Zardari's call for foreign probe an eyewash?

London: Asif Ali Zardari's call to involve Britain and the UN in the probe into Benazir Bhutto's assassination may not go anywhere.

With Pakistani authorities ruling out any separate enquiry by experts from outside, British security experts say there's little they can do now.

Meanwhile, Benazir's son Bilawal Bhutto will get 24-hour protection from Scotland Yard's Diplomatic Protection Group when he returns to Oxford later this month.

In fact, there are few police forces in the world that carry the kind of credibility Scotland Yard does, which is why Asif Zardari has been insisting since the day Benazir was assassinated that Scotland Yard must investigate how she was killed and who could have killed her.

But based on past experience, experts in London are doubtful that foreign police and forensic experts will be called in.

A French government-funded programme to train Pakistani forensic experts to secure bomb and murder sites and gather clues has come to nothing.

“As one French diplomat who I know very well said with a bit of a smirk, they have forgotten very quickly that one doesn't clean up a bomb site within the hour,” says University of London and associate fellow, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Dr Marie Lall.

There is another concern - how serious is Zardari when he demands that Scotland Yard be involved?

"Perhaps he is trying to say to the Musharraf government that look, we have the support of these other governments; you are not the only person who has international support, or UK support, or US support,” says Lall.

As far as the Pakistan government is concerned, it seems to have done a U-turn. Earlier it said that international help was not welcome. Now its ambassador to the US says the government is open to outside experts helping investigate Bhutto's assassination.

But there will be no separate inquiry of the type the UN carried out into a former Lebanese prime minister's assassination.

He ruled a UN style probe on the lines of the Lebanese former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Investigators in Pakistan are left with almost nothing to work on and there seems little anyone - Britain or UN – can do. Zardari's call seems to be more political than concerned about security.

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