GENEVA, June 21: Swiss prosecutors announced on Friday that they had refused to reopen a probe into alleged corruption in the 1990s by President Asif Ali Zardari and Benazir Bhutto.

Prosecutors in Geneva said the decision was taken on February 4 this year, and that they had only opted to make it public as a result of street protests in Pakistan.

They declined to comment in detail, but the Swiss news portal 20minutes.ch published photographs of anti-Zardari protesters burning Switzerland’s flag at a rally in Pakistan.

Mr Zardari and Ms Bhutto were alleged to have siphoned $12 million in state cash in the 1990s, when he was a government minister and she was premier.

Ms Bhutto lost office in 1996, and a year later Pakistan made a formal request for Swiss legal help in a probe of the couple and Ms Bhutto’s mother Nusrat Bhutto.

Ms Bhutto went into self-imposed exile in the United Arab Emirates in 1997, returning in 2007, only to be assassinated in a bomb attack on an election rally the same year.

Weeks before Ms Bhutto was killed, Pakistan had withdrawn its request for help from the Swiss, and Geneva investigators formally closed their side of the probe in 2008.

In November 2012, however, Pakistan’s government renewed its request for Swiss legal assistance after being ordered to do so by its own supreme court.

Geneva prosecutors underlined on Friday that no new evidence had emerged since the case was dropped in 2008, meaning they could not reopen the investigation.

In addition, the fact that the alleged offences took place more than 15 years ago meant that the statute of limitations had expired, they said.

They also complained about mixed messages from Pakistan.—AFP