Pakistan to announce new poll date today

Islamabad: Pakistan plans to postpone next week's election after Benazir Bhutto's killing sparked turmoil in the nuclear-armed country, but officials put off a final announcement until Wednesday to consult parties.

Election Commission official Kanwar Dilshad told reporters yesterday that "in principle" the election was being delayed from January 8 and a new date would be announced on Wednesday.

The government also said President Pervez Musharraf would address the nation tonight for the first time since Bhutto's murder.

Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the other main opposition party, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, want the election to go ahead as scheduled. "It is up to the people of Pakistan to choose their future, and the time is now," Sharif and Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now co-chairman of her party along with their 19-year old son, Bilawal, said in a joint statement.

Later yesterday, Bilawal flew to Dubai with his two sisters from Karachi. A dozen supporters waited near the Bhutto residence as the newly appointed PPP leader was driven home.

'Ministry backtracks'

Amid mounting disbelief over the official reason behind Bhutto's death, CNN reported yesterday that Pakistan's Interior Ministry had backtracked on its statement that the former prime minister died because she hit her head on a sunroof latch during a shooting and bomb attack.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema was quoted as saying on the CNN website that he based his statement about the sunroof latch "on the initial investigations and the reports by the medical doctors" who treated her at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

But Athar Minallah, a lawyer on the board that manages Rawalpindi General Hospital, told CNN that doctors did not make the statements attributed to them by the government.

Dossier: 'Evidence on rigging'

On the day she was killed, Benazir Bhutto planned to give two US lawmakers a dossier accusing the ruling regime and Pakistan's intelligence service of rigging upcoming elections, an aide said yesterday, according to AP.

Senator Latif Khosa, a lawmaker from Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party, said she planned to meet Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island on Thursday evening, a few hours after the rally where she was killed. She was preparing to give the US lawmakers a 160-page report of complaints on "pre-poll rigging" the Musharraf government and the military-run Inter Services Intelligence was engaged in, Khosa said.