Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, blamed by the Pakistan government for masterminding the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto, had twice sent emissaries to inform her that he was not her enemy, according to a senior leader of her party.
"Identify your enemy, I am not your enemy, I have nothing to do with you or against you or with the assassination attempt on you on October 18," Mehsud had said through the emissaries.
This was revealed by Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party. "The top PPP leadership trusted the message," Babar told The News.
Mehsud's message was conveyed through "two different reliable emissaries" after the suicide attack on Bhutto's homecoming procession in Karachi on October 18 that killed 165 people.
Bhutto was assassinated by a suicide attacker after she addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi on Thursday.
Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema had named Mehsud -- a militant leader from South Waziristan who was recently made chief of the Tehrik Taliban-e-Pakistan, a coalition of pro-Taliban groups from northwestern Pakistan --as the mastermind behind both attacks on Bhutto.
But Babar said Mehsud had conveyed to Bhutto that his activities were limited to Waziristan and were of a 'defensive nature. "I have neither the resources to fight outside Waziristan nor do I have any plans to attack Benazir Bhutto in the future," Mehsud had told the PPP leadership.
Babar said: "We have no doubt that Baitullah Mehsud is not involved in Thursday's tragic incident." On the other hand, the PPP has "serious doubts against those mentioned in the letter written by Benazir to President Pervez Musharraf before the attack in Karachi," he added.
Bhutto reportedly named four government officials and political leaders who, she claimed, posed a threat to her life in her letter to Musharraf. She never publicly disclosed the names of these persons.
"If the government had seriously gone through the contents of the letter and had fulfilled our demand to hire the services of some foreign investigative agencies to probe the Karachi attack, Thursday's tragic incident might have been avoided," Babar said.
Instead of diverting the people's attention towards Mehsud, "matters can proceed in a better direction if the government hired the services of an international professional investigative agency," he said.
Babar also claimed that the transcript of a purported conversation, in which Mehsud congratulated a religious leader for Bhutto's assassination, was "ridiculous and a deliberate attempt to divert the attention of the nation from the real culprits". The transcript was released to the media by the Interior Ministry on Friday.
Rehman Malik, Bhutto's security advisor, also said that a senior journalist, who had spoken to Mehsud, had informed him that the militant leader had "no enmity with Benazir and had no plans to attack or kill her".
The PPP has demanded that the government should give credible evidence regarding the involvement of Mehsud in Bhutto's assassination, Malik said.
Earlier, on the directions of Bhutto, PPP leader Safdar Abbasi had asked Senator Saleh Shah to contact Mehsud and ask him why he wanted to kill Bhutto.
When Shah met Mehsud in the tribal areas, the militant commander assured Shah that some enemy of Bhutto was "deliberately attempting to spread misinformation that he wanted to kill her".