WASHINGTON, Jan 18: The CIA has concluded that members of Al Qaeda and allies of tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible for the Dec 27 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the agency’s director said.

In a 45-minute interview to The Washington Post, Director CIA Michael V. Hayden also warned that Al Qaeda and its allies do not just want to destabilise the Musharraf government but they also want to harm the Pakistani state.

“It is clear that their intention is to continue to try to do harm to the Pakistani state as it currently exists,” he said.

This is so far the most definitive public assessment of Ms Bhutto’s murder by any US official which, Mr Hayden said, is based on CIA’s own findings and not on the information forwarded by the Pakistani government.

The CIA chief said his agency has concluded that Ms Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, with support from Al Qaeda’s terrorist network. The Post noted that his view mirrors the Pakistani government’s assertions.

Mr Hayden claimed that the same alliance between local and international terrorists poses a grave risk to the government of President Pervez Musharraf because of his close alliance with the US in the fight against terrorism.

“What you see is, I think, a change in the character of what’s going on there,” he said. “You’ve got this nexus now that probably was always there in latency but is now active: a nexus between Al Qaeda and various extremist and separatist groups.”

Days after Ms Bhutto’s assassination, the Interior Ministry in Islamabad released intercepted communications between Mehsud and his supporters in which the tribal leader praised the killing and appeared to take credit for it. Pakistani and US officials have declined to comment on the origin of that intercept, but before this interview the Bush administration had been cautious about publicly embracing the Pakistani assessment.

The Post noted that many Pakistanis have voiced suspicions that the Musharraf government had a role in Ms Bhutto’s assassination, and her family has alleged a wide conspiracy involving government officials.

Mr Hayden declined to discuss the intelligence behind the CIA’s assessment, which rejects the suspicions expressed by Ms Bhutto’s party and supports President Musharraf’s assertions.

“This was done by that network around Baitullah Mehsud. We have no reason to question that,” Mr Hayden said. He described the killing as “part of an organised campaign” that has included suicide bombings and other attacks on Pakistani leaders.

Mr Hayden said the CIA had always viewed Al Qaeda’s association with tribal militants in NWFP as “an ultimate danger to the United States but now it appears that it is a serious base of danger to the current well-being of Pakistan” as well.

The Post noted that Mr Hayden’s anxieties about Pakistan’s stability are echoed by other US officials who have visited Pakistan since Ms Bhutto’s assassination. White House, intelligence and Defence Department officials have held a series of meetings to discuss US options in the event that the current crisis deepens, including the possibility of covert action involving Special Forces, the Post said.

Mr Hayden declined to comment on the policy meetings but said that the CIA already was heavily engaged in the region and has not shifted its officers or changed its operations significantly since the crisis began.

“The Afghan-Pakistan border region has been an area of focus for this agency since about 11 o’clock in the morning of September 11, [2001], and I really mean this,” Mr Hayden said. “We haven’t done a whole lot of retooling there in the last one week, one month, three months, six months and so on. This has been up there among our very highest priorities.”

Mr Hayden said that the United States has “not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis”. The turmoil of the past few weeks has only deepened that cooperation, he said, by highlighting “what are now even more clearly mutual and common interests”.

Mr Hayden also acknowledged the difficulties – diplomatic and practical – involved in helping combat extremism in a country divided by ethnic, religious and cultural allegiances. “This looks simpler the further away you get from it,” he said. “And the closer you get to it, geography, history, culture all begin to intertwine and make it more complex.”