Islamabad - Pakistani caretaker Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro ordered a judicial inquiry Friday into the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as an al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan reportedly claimed responsibility for her death. Soomro told journalists after an emergency cabinet meeting that a judge would be appointed to head a committee to investigate the shooting-suicide bomb attack on Bhutto Thursday as she left an election campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi outside Islamabad.
The head of the committee would be appointed in consultation with officials from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and the panel's report would be submitted within a timeframe to be determined later, he said.
Embattled President Pervez Musharraf did not attend the cabinet meeting, which was held as reputed al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Abu al-Yazid told Asia Times Online that the movement had ordered the hit on Bhutto, which Soomro said he could not confirm.
"At the moment, we cannot say who was responsible for the attack," he said.
Soomro said the cabinet was considering postponing parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8 because of Bhutto's murder but would not act until after consulting with the country's main opposition parties.
"Right now, the elections stand as they are," he said. "I am ready to meet the opposition leaders on one minute's notice, and we are even in contact with some of them."
Nawaz Sharif - the country's other main opposition leader and, like Bhutto, a former prime minister - announced Thursday night that his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz would boycott the polls in protest. Altaf Hussain, leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a government-aligned party, called for the polls to be delayed for at least two months.
Meanwhile, Mustafa, who emerged in May as the chief of al-Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan, told the Asia Times news site that a death squad consisting of members of the Pakistan-based militant Islamic group Laskhar-i-Jhangvi carried out Bhutto's assassination on al-Qaeda's orders.
"This is our first major victory against those who have been siding with infidels in a fight against al-Qaeda and declared a war against mujahedin," Mustafa was quoted as saying.
He referred to recent campaign addresses by Bhutto ahead of the January 8 elections in which she lambasted Islamic extremism in the country's volatile north-west region.
The claim of responsibility came as Pakistan prepared Friday to bury Bhutto, whose assassination sparked nationwide riots and the country's most serious political crisis in decades.
Laskhar-i-Jhangvi, based in Pakistan's Punjab region, is a known collaborator with both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The group attempted to assassinate Sharif in January 1999 when he was prime minister and is believed to have assisted in several high-profile attacks on Westerners in Pakistan, including the January 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, according to counterterrorism sources.
Pakistan has seen more than 50 terrorist attacks targeting the government and military in 2007, which Musharraf has blamed on the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that have regrouped in the North-West Frontier Province's lawless tribal areas.
The instability in western Pakistan has directly affected security in Afghanistan, US officials said, and presents a nightmare scenario for President George W Bush's administration. US officials concede that al-Qaeda has regrouped inside Pakistan and is not only launching attacks there and in Afghanistan but also has the space to plan future attacks on the United States.
Musharraf, a critical ally in the Bush administration's fight on terrorism, has vowed to root out violent Islamic extremists from the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan and during an address to the nation on Thursday night said Bhutto's assassination "was the action of the same terrorists against whom we are at war."
