Bombing may stay unsolved

The government of President Pervez Musharraf says that those responsible for trying to kill former leader Benazir Bhutto in a horrific bombing last week that left nearly 140 people dead will be brought to justice. But history suggests otherwise.

Of dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks that have taken place in Pakistan over the last several years, including a number of high-profile assassination attempts, very few such cases have been definitively solved.

One notable exception: two attempts in 2003 to kill Musharraf with massive bombs near his headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. The alleged mastermind was hunted down and shot to death months later by Pakistani security forces.

Analysts, along with current and former investigators and government officials, said it was highly unlikely that those who planned the attack against Bhutto in this port city as she returned home from eight years in self-imposed exile would be captured, tried and convicted.

They cited factors including imprecise investigative methods, the shifting nature of the many Islamic militant groups with the desire and motivation to kill Bhutto, the vagaries of the Pakistani judicial system and a degree of sympathy in some official quarters for the militants’ cause.

“Are we going to try? Yes,” said one Pakistani official who is close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Are we going to succeed? To be very honest, I have my doubts.”

Both Bhutto and the government have cast suspicion on Islamists who are angered by her pro-Western stance and repelled by the idea of a woman in a leadership role. But assuming that theory is correct, narrowing down the list of suspects will be a difficult and painstaking task.

Modern forensic methods are little used in Pakistan. From the moment of the attack early Friday, the crime scene was tainted and trampled by hundreds of people, victims and rescuers alike.

Amid panic and chaos, police made little effort to cordon off the area around the blasts, which took place on the main boulevard leading from Karachi’s international airport to the center of the city.

“It wasn’t exactly ‘CSI’ -- not Miami, or Las Vegas, or even some small town,” said a Western diplomat in Karachi, referring to the popular American TV crime series in which latex-gloved forensics experts examine the tiniest of clues.

Bhutto, unharmed in the attack, was quickly hustled from her damaged vehicle, which then sat by the roadside virtually unguarded for hours. By early morning, boys were swarming over the scene, collecting bolts and ball bearings sprayed in all directions by the force of the twin blasts. Cars and trucks passed within inches of the spot where the explosions occurred.

Bhutto has demanded that foreign investigators be brought in to help with the case. The United States and other Western nations offered to provide technical assistance; the government swiftly rejected any outside aid.

Some analysts said Bhutto might have erred in going public with her demand.

“The implication, of course, was that she does not have confidence in the ability of Pakistani investigators,” said retired Pakistani army Brig. Gen. Naeem Salik, a scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “A private request might have been more effective -- otherwise the government is in the embarrassing position of saying, ‘Yes, we accept our inability to investigate properly.’ ”

At least initially, Karachi and provincial police took a lead role in the investigation, although a case of this scope and complexity is considered by many observers to be well beyond their abilities.

“The best detectives we have are the military and intelligence agencies. When they marshal their resources, they can put up a pretty impressive show,” said Ayaz Amir, a Karachi-based columnist for the national newspaper Dawn. “But investigation definitely isn’t the strong suit of the local police; they’re badly overstretched, and they wouldn’t be counted as the world’s most efficient.”

Some of those with the technical skills to carry out the investigation, however, are likely to be compromised by ideology, said author Ahmed Rashid, who has written widely on the Taliban and other militant groups.

“The intelligence agencies are working at cross purposes to one another, and some have people who are sympathetic to the Islamists,” he said. “I think the prospects of getting to the bottom of this are very poor.”

Bhutto, while being careful to avoid any direct accusations against Musharraf, has said she believes elements in his government were complicit in the attack. The bombing came as her convoy moved at little more than a walking pace through enormous crowds that had turned out to greet her.

The 54-year-old former prime minister has claimed that the failure of streetlights as the convoy approached the outskirts of Karachi after midnight pointed to sabotage on the part of authorities.

Despite angry denials from the government, analysts say the notion of an accomplice or accomplices in a position of authority is by no means farfetched. Musharraf has acknowledged that junior army and air force officers were involved in the plot to kill him in 2003.

More recently, suicide bombings in the last three months targeting Pakistani military installations were believed by investigators to have been carried out with the help of insiders.

Bhutto received threats from militant groups before returning to Pakistan, and her lawyer, Farooq Naik, appealed Tuesday for better government protection for her. He cited a new threat against her, this one involving the prospective use of a female suicide bomber.

Pakistani authorities are searching the national database of identity cards for a match with the features of two severed heads found at the scene, neither of which has been identified and claimed by relatives. Suicide bombers are commonly decapitated by the upward force of the blast from explosives attached to their bodies.

But analysts said the difficulty lay not so much in identifying the bombers but in uncovering the attackers’ affiliation and the circle of those involved in planning the blasts.

Militant groups operating in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan have links with urban radical groups, ties that are particularly difficult to track in a megalopolis like Karachi, with a population of at least 15 million and a long history as a base of Islamic militancy.

Rashid, the author, said he doubted that even the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan’s main spy agency, had an accurate picture of the plethora of militant groups and militias operating out of the tribal areas, especially volatile Waziristan. All major cities in the country had been penetrated by these groups, he said.

Even if suspects are caught and charged, Pakistani human rights groups say, confessions are often unreliable because they are obtained through torture. Not infrequently, that leads to cases being declared closed when the culprits are still at large.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said Tuesday that he was certain that the case would end with convictions. But some veteran members of Pakistan’s intelligence community say even a good-faith effort by investigators might not yield a definitive result.

“The list of suspects is large, and pinpointing someone will not be easy,” said Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, a former ISI chief. “It is certainly possible that after everything that can be done has been done, there will be no conclusion.”

laura.king@latimes.com