Verdict on Bhutto slaying stirs anger

ISLAMABAD » A Pakistani court on Thursday sentenced two former police officers to 17 years in prison for failing to protect former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, but the same court acquitted five suspected militants who had confessed to taking part in her 2007 assassination.

Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, expressed “disappointment and shock” over the verdict, saying “justice has not been done.”

Bhutto, then a prominent opposition leader, was killed by a suicide bomber who rushed her motorcade as she was campaigning to replace then-President Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf, accused of complicity in the assassination, pleaded not guilty at a 2013 court appearance and lives in self-imposed exile. The judge Thursday ordered his property seized after he failed to appear in court.

Bhutto became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim-majority country in 1988, when she first became prime minister. She was the daughter of another former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1977 after being deposed in a coup. She served as prime minister again from 19931996.

At the time of her assassination in December 2007, she was a leading opposition figure running to replace Musharraf, who had seized power in a bloodless coup eight years earlier. He was forced to resign in disgrace when her party returned to power in an election held shortly after her death, in 2008.