ISLAMABAD, April 14: The National Assembly asked the government on Monday to approach the United Nations to get former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination investigated by an international commission, on the pattern of a probe into the 2005 killing of former prime minister of Lebanon Rafiq Hariri.

The demand was made in a unanimously passed resolution moved by Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Farooq H. Naek, who later said the government would move the UN Security Council “as soon as possible” to set up the panel that the document said must “identify the culprits, perpetrators, organisers and financiers behind this heinous crime and bring them to justice”.

The coalition government’s move came two weeks after its cabinet took office, and months after the previous caretaker government dismissed a similar demand from the family of Ms Bhutto who was killed on Dec 27, 2007 in a gun-and-bomb attack outside Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh.

PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari had also written to the UN secretary-general and the Security Council president requesting for a UN probe, but a UN spokesperson then said the world body could consider such a request if it were made by the Pakistani government.

However, before that the Security Council had condemned Ms Bhutto’s assassination as well as an Oct 18, 2007 attempt on her life with a bomb attack in Karachi on her homecoming procession that killed about 150 people.

The caretaker government only sought help from Britain’s Scotland Yard police to investigate the cause, rather the responsibility of the assassination, which shocked the world and sparked violent protests in the country.

The brief two-sentence resolution, which was moved after suspension of normal business of the house and passed with a unanimous voice vote, said: “This house mourns the tragic assassination of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto resulting in colossal loss to the people of Pakistan as well as the world. This house recommends that the government should approach the United Nations to get the tragic assassination of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto probed by forming an international investigation commission to be known as ‘Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Commission’ to identify the culprits, perpetrators, organisers and financiers behind this heinous crime and bring them to justice.”

Mr Naek told reporters afterwards that the government would now make the request to the Security Council “as soon as possible” by writing to its president and the UN secretary-general.

He said former caretaker prime minister Mohammedmian Soomro never replied to Mr Zardari’s letter asking for a request to be sent to the UN for the probe.

Some party members who accompanied Ms Bhutto at the time of the attack said she was killed by an assassin’s bullet while waving to a cheering crowd from the roof escape hatch of her bullet-proof vehicle outside the an exit of the Liaquat Bagh. But the report by the Scotland Yard investigators said Ms Bhutto, whose autopsy was not done at the request of Mr Zardari, died “as a result of a severe head injury sustained as a consequence of the bomb blast and due to head impact somewhere in the escape hatch of the vehicle”.

The scene of the killings was washed down by fire brigade hoses soon after the incident for unexplained reasons.

The Scotland Yard report said: “The task of establishing exactly what happened as complicated by the lack of an extended and detailed search of the crime scene, the absence of an autopsy, and the absence of recognised body recovery and victim identification processes.”

The day after the first assassination attempt on her on Oct 18, Ms Bhutto told a news conference in Karachi that she had already written a letter to President Pervez Musharraf naming three persons who could kill her but she never named them.

Mr Harir was killed, along with 21 others, when explosives equivalent of around 1,000kg of TNT were detonated as his motorcade drove near a hotel in Beirut. Among the dead were several of his bodyguards and his friend and former minister for economy Bassel Fleihan.

After the passage of the resolution, the National Assembly continued a debate on the prevailing power crisis in the country for the second. The debate will be continued when the house meets on Tuesday at 4pm.