THE PPP leadership has not bothered to identify the gaps which it said it had detected in the report by the FIA’s joint investigation team on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The FIA report, a 48-page dossier, was submitted as a challan to an anti-terrorism court last November, and the PPP-led government seemed satisfied with it then. Four months later, at the central executive committee’s special session in Naudero, Information Minister Firdaus Awan has said the party had decided to give another opportunity to the FIA to fill ‘some gaps’. At the same time, the president, prime minister and CEC members were said to be satisfied with the report. So what are the reservations about? We are told that the CEC’s ‘internal discussion’ would not be made public. Could there be greater confusion?

Three reports — by the UN commission, Scotland Yard and the JIT — have been made public. Yet the PPP has not adopted a categorical position on the assassination. One could understand its keenness to have foreign agencies probe the murder when it was in opposition. However, even after it came to power, the party asked parliament to demand a UN report. Now the PPP still wants to keep the issue alive, though its stated position is that TTP’s Baitullah Mehsud had ordered the killing. Is the FIA or the government looking at a bigger conspiracy involving a hidden foreign or local hand or rogue elements in the establishment? The PPP should either leave the issue behind or come up with any clues it has found to the assassination of its leader and take the guilty to court. The party needs to do this if it does not want to create an impression that it is playing politics. The mess it has created in this matter has only confounded the issue, betraying chaos in party ranks and thinking.