#asifalizardari

Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari was elected as Pakistan’s 14th President , becoming the head of state for a second time.

Zardari, 68, was the joint candidate of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) while his rival Mahmood Khan Achakzai, 75, was the candidate of the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC).

The new president was elected by the electoral college of the newly elected members of the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies, as per the provisions of the Constitution.

A businessman-turned-politician, Zardari is the husband of slain Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

He received 255 votes while his opponent got 119, Pakistani media reported. Zardari would replace the incumbent Dr Arif Alvi, whose five-year term ended last year.

However, he has continued since the new electoral college was not yet formed.

Zardari, who served as the president from 2008 to 2013, will also be the first civilian to be elected for the second time as president.

As Pakistan marked the 16th death anniversary of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the mystery surrounding her assassination remains unsolved, according to a media report.

Bhutto, Pakistan’s first woman prime minister, was assassinated in a suicide bomb blast-cum-gun shooting attack outside the famous Liaquat Bagh as she was about to depart after addressing an election rally on December 27, 2007. She was aged 54. Pakistan was under the rule of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf at that time.

According to a report in Geo News, Bhutto’s party — Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) — remained in power from 2008 till 2013 but was unable to take any meaningful steps to find the people and forces behind her assassination.

“With each passing day, the mystery surrounding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto continued to grow. First with the change of the route of her return after addressing the rally, a hurried washing of the crime scene by the administration, washing away critical evidence, and a shake-up in top local bureaucracy,” the report said.

The administration at that time had declared the incident “a terror strike” and even released intercepts of alleged terrorists’ telephonic conversations and sketches of two persons purported as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) members.

Musharraf had called an investigation team from Scotland Yard of the United Kingdom to investigate the killing of Bhutto. The probe team submitted a report on January 8, 2008. However, both PPP and former president and Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari rejected the Scotland Yard report, declaring it inept and full of doubts, and accused Musharraf of being behind the assassination.

There were repeated demands for an independent inquiry by the UN into the incident by the PPP government and eventually, Bank Ki-Moon, the then Secretary-General of the United Nations announced in February 2009 for sending a high-level UN Fact Finding Mission to look into the incident.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission arrived in Islamabad in July 2009 and released its report but that was vague and without any conclusive remarks regarding identifying the culprits behind the tragic incident.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission report was rejected by Zardari and the PPP, citing reasons that it contains no substance and no efforts were made by the UN Mission to point out the people and the elements behind the gruesome suicide attack on the two-time prime minister.

“Over the last 16 years, there have been multiple theories behind the elimination of Benazir Bhutto but there is hardly any solid evidence available to corroborate those theories,” the Geo News report said.

“But there were enough events that followed BB’s assassination which strongly indicated that all out efforts were made to hide the facts to confuse things and mislead the investigators who tried to solve the ‘mystery’,” it said.