Police arrest teenager over Bhutto attack: reports
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There are reports that Pakistani police have arrested a teenager who was allegedly part of a five-man squad assigned to kill opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last month.
The suspect, 15-year-old Aitezaz Shah, was said to have been arrested from the northwestern city of Dera Ismail Khan while planning a suicide bombing over the Muslim festival of Ashura.
Pakistani security officials, who declined to be named, say Shah told interrogators he was part of a back-up team of three bombers who were tasked with killing former premier Bhutto if the original December 27 attack by two men had failed.
But Interior Ministry spokesman Iqbal Cheema would not confirm the arrest.
"It is not in my knowledge so far," he told agency reporters.
A former Pakistani prime minister who was planning to run in 2008's presidential elections, Ms Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and suicide bomb attack at an election rally in Rawalpindi.
The Government and the CIA have blamed Al Qaeda and tribal warlord Baitullah Mehsud for her killing.
Security officials said that Shah, originally from the southern city of Karachi, went for training last year at a camp run by one of Mehsud's commanders in the tribal border region of Waziristan.
He allegedly said the attackers in the team that killed Bhutto were called Bilal and Ikramullah - the same names mentioned in an alleged telephone conversation between Mehsud and another militant the day after Bhutto's death.
The tape was released the day after her killing by Pakistan's interior ministry.
Shah's whereabouts at the time of the attack were not immediately clear. One security official said he was in Rawalpindi, the city where Bhutto was killed, while another said he was in the tribal area of Waziristan.
- AFP
