Pivotal Pakistan

U.S.-Pakistan Divide Over Bhutto's Death Widens
By Jay Solomon, Yaroslav Trofimov and Siobhan Gorman

KARACHI, Pakistan -- U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats increasingly believe former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto died from a gunshot wound, placing Washington at odds with Islamabad over the cause of her death.

The government of President Pervez Musharraf has held Ms. Bhutto died on Dec. 27 from a fractured skull, sustained when the shock wave from a suicide bombing threw the opposition politician against the lever of her vehicle's sunroof.

But U.S. officials said information independently gathered from Pakistan, including eyewitness accounts and video footage, left few doubts that Ms. Bhutto was shot by one or more assailants. "There is a consensus emerging that she must have been shot," said a U.S. administration official working in Pakistan.

The diverging opinions, U.S. officials acknowledged, could prove problematic as the Bush administration attempts to stabilize the fragile nuclear power.

Washington had hoped to build an alliance between Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party as a way to guide Pakistan back to civilian rule. But Ms. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has charged Mr. Musharraf's government with involvement in his wife's death. The PPP's leadership believes discrepancies in the investigation and the government's shifting explanations point to a cover-up, a charge Mr. Musharraf denied Thursday.

The U.S. is in a difficult position to mediate, Bush administration officials said, given Washington's growing doubts about the Pakistani government's probe. Voicing such concerns could further undermine Mr. Musharraf. Staying silent brings risks, too.

"If the U.S. doesn't stand up against this, we're going to lose more support inside Pakistan," said a U.S. government strategist working on Pakistan.

On Thursday, Mr. Musharraf said he had invited the United Kingdom's Scotland Yard to help with the probe. Pakistan's president acknowledged mistakes in the investigation to date, signaling his government could change its accounting of Ms. Bhutto's death. One U.S. official speculated that the Pakistani government may be embarrassed that a shooter got to Ms. Bhutto in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani army.

Scotland Yard arrived Friday morning in Pakistan, according to a European official, who emphasized that the British agency will have to work under a number of constraints. "We have to bear in mind that they have a different way of doing things," the official said. In addition, he said, much evidence was lost in the hasty cleanup in the aftermath of the attack.

Complicating matters, Mr. Zardari hasn't responded to the Islamabad government's request to exhume his late wife's body in order to conduct a full autopsy. He refused to authorize an autopsy immediately after the attack, contending he didn't trust government doctors. Instead, medics performed only an external post-mortem, taking X-rays of Ms. Bhutto's fractured skull.

Ms. Bhutto faced a similar predicament after the death of her father, former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. At the time, many PPP activists believed Mr. Bhutto had been tortured to death rather than hanged by Pakistan's military regime, as the official version described. Ms. Bhutto wrote in her memoirs that she refused to exhume the body: "History will judge him on his life," she said she replied to the activists. "The details of his death are not important."

American officials say Washington is pursuing several avenues to pinpoint the cause of Ms. Bhutto's death: eyewitness accounts, medical records and technical tools such as telecommunications and video intercepts. U.S. intelligence officials wouldn't cite specifically what information helped them conclude Ms. Bhutto was shot.

Eyewitness accounts seem to back up the U.S. position. Sherry Rehman, the PPP's information secretary and one of Ms. Bhutto's closest aides, said in an interview that the hole in Ms. Bhutto's head was so big that the former premier "bled buckets." She added her belief that "this was a shooting. The sunroof lever just doesn't do that."

After the attack, Ms. Bhutto was transferred from her SUV to Ms. Rehman's car, which was following behind, for the ride to the hospital. Ms. Rehman helped wash Ms. Bhutto's corpse in accordance with Muslim tradition and said the rest of her body was intact.

Despite concern over the professed cause of Ms. Bhutto's death, U.S. intelligence officials say they are increasingly confident about a separate Islamabad claim: that a Pakistani militant, Baitullah Mehsud, was the mastermind behind the assassination.

Mr. Mehsud is the leader of a Pakistani Islamist group believed aligned with the Taliban and al Qaeda. President Musharraf said Mr. Mehsud and an ally, Maulana Fazlullah, were behind 19 suicide attacks inside Pakistan over the past three months.

The morning after Ms. Bhutto's death, Pakistan security services intercepted telecommunications intercepts they said proved Mr. Mehsud's involvement. (See the transcript the Pakistani government released.) A spokesman for the Pakistani insurgent denied the charges. U.S. intelligence officials say their own investigation has backed this claim.

Intelligence analysts believe "Mehsud probably, most likely, was responsible for this," said a U.S. intelligence official, adding that intelligence officials don't believe the Pakistani government was behind the plot.

The U.S. has chalked such accusations to "PR gone bad," the official said. In the U.S. or Britain, the area would have been sealed off immediately, he said, but that is not standard practice in Pakistan. "There's no CSI Pakistan running in there," he said.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com , Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com  and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com