Islamabad: Pakistani authorities on Wednesday arrested two senior police officers for allegedly failing to protect slain former prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, a government prosecutor said.
Bhutto was assassinated in a suicide attack on December 27, 2007, during an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad.
Saud Aziz, then district police officer, and his assistant Khurram Shehzad were detained after a court in Rawalpindi denied their request for bail.
Both police officials were accused of providing insufficient security to the two-time prime minister, refusing a post-mortem examination and hosing down the crime scene before all the evidence was collected.
The attorney for the two officials argued that Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, the current president, had asked the police not to carry out a post-mortem.
He presented what he claimed was a recording of a phone call by Zardari to Aziz, but the court rejected it as a piece of evidence and remanded the pair into the custody of the Federal Investigation Agency for 14 days.
"The court has set Jan 7 for the next hearing," government prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali said.
Police said they had earlier arrested five suspects in connection with Bhutto's murder. Almost all of them are alleged to have been associated with the local Taliban fighting government forces in the country's tribal region along the Afghan border.
Bhutto's family, including Zardari, said they suspected some elements in Pakistan's intelligence agencies might have been involved in the assassination.
A three-member UN panel that investigated the killing said in April that the government of then-military ruler Pervez Musharraf had failed to provide Bhutto with adequate security despite threats on her life.
Bhutto had taken a firm stand against Taliban militants before she returned to Pakistan in October 2007, ending a decade of self-imposed exile to take part in elections.
After her death, Zardari led the party to victory in the elections in early 2008 and eventually replaced Musharraf months later.
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