KARACHI, Feb 15: How much did it cost the country to commission the team of forensic investigators in order to establish the cause of death of Benazir Bhutto on Dec 27?

The government alone knows the number. But the last time forensic detectives were called in on the job was to uncover the trails of a possible financial fraud, which had prompted the stock market crash of March 2005.

That incident, which stock brokers love to call ‘crisis’ instead of a ‘crash’ had seen Pakistan’s premier capital market, the KSE, lose nearly a quarter of its value in just 15 days, between March 15 and 30.

Forensic investigators were paid fees in the staggering sum of $10,000 per day, which for a 10 to 12 weeks work, aggregated to a total of $1 million. Up until then, it was billed as the most expensive corporate probe in the history of the country.

Lawyer Zainuddin comments: “The role of a forensic investigator in prevention and detection of frauds, murder and other crimes is well established, but as a basic requirement, those investigators need to have working knowledge of the legal systems; litigation processes and procedures and excellent communication skills”.

The black coat ponders for a moment and then asks: “Are those foreign experts already armed with all these tools? How about Scotland Yard and US detectives’ understanding of the local dialects?”

But the forensic investigators have now worked on both those cases -- one of a possible financial fraud and the other more gruesome, murder.

Though poles apart in the nature of the cases, some striking similarities could be detected in the conduct of that distant market crash of March 2005 and the recent BB assassination.

In both cases, the detectives from overseas were summoned on the job long time after the compelling evidence had been destroyed; in the first case four forensic detectives, who descended from US poured over rolls and rolls of trading documents of at least 60 brokerage houses.

That was six months after the event; in the second case more than 15 Scotland Yard spooks were asked to comb the ground several days after the tragic incident. They looked for smouldering pieces of charred human flesh (sic) where there were none to be found for the place had been all immaculately swept clean, washed up and dried.

Legal experts say that to put even the most brilliant brains from abroad on the job of detection after all clues of a crime had been wiped off was akin to pushing ‘blind men into a dark room and asking them to look for a black cat that isn’t there”.

In both cases forensic detectives worked under tight ‘terms of reference’ -- to detect if sufficient evidence could be presented, which might prove that “certain influential brokers had systematically and manipulatively inflated and then deflated market prices, reaping profits in the process.”

And in the second case more simply to determine what caused the death of BB. In both instances, there was general scepticism from the beginning on the ability of the overseas spooks to be able to go far in uncovering the trail of the crime.

And finally, in both instances the wise guys from abroad came out, endorsing the government’s earlier view: Brokers could be guilty of minor wash trades (and not fraudulent deals) and the cause of BB death was ‘head injury’ (and not bullet wounds). But the experts made not too astonishing discovery that what had hit the head was ‘lip of the inside of vehicle’ and not the ‘sun roof’.

Public is at a loss to understand what makes the government think that foreign detectives (hands in pocket and smartly dressed as to make the biggest corporate bosses turn green with envy) would be able to see what the local police hands and knees down on the ground were unable to find.

The brilliant fictional detective Sherlock Homes, who would unravel mysteries as ‘elementary’, lived on Baker Street London, but the burly, wide-eyed Inspector George Lestred of Scotland Yard, could barely match the brains of Homes.

In saying so, no one is questioning the ability of detective Superintendent John MacBrayne, who led the Scotland Yard detective team on the BB assassination case, but his ‘tools’ and ‘terms’ were all too limited.