THE UN investigation into former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's murder began on Monday, before the arrival of the main team, with a UN official visiting Liaquat Bagh, the assassination site. The UN investigation commission is due to arrive on Thursday, an important landmark in the murder, which occurred on 27 December 2007. After it, the PPP campaigned to have a UN investigation held into it, along with other promises to the public. The investigation by the UN coincides with an application from Ms Bhutto's protocol officer, Ch Aslam, to the DPO Rawalpindi, in which he blames the murder on a conspiracy, and accuses many of being part, including two PPP leaders who have become federal ministers, Law Minister Babar Awan and Interior Minister Rehman Malik. He has also accused the Interior Ministry hierarchy of the time, including the then caretaker Minister Brig (retd) Hamid Nawaz, the then Secretary Kamal Shah and the then spokesman Brig (retd) Javed Iqbal. The President of the time, Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, is also included in the list of conspirators. Ch Aslam also accuses a number of senior policemen of the Rawalpindi police of being in on the conspiracy. When it arrives, the UN investigation team will have to deal with this application. However, the UN team has not been mandated to take any action, which is still the prerogative of the home government. The team will merely issue a report, and it would be up to the home government to fix responsibility in its light. Therefore, the application will probably receive some attention from the UN team, but it will not take any action on it, simply because it is not permitted to. The filing of the application, with an eye obviously on the coming of the long-awaited (especially in PPP circles) UN investigation, will probably raise all the stories that have grown around the Benazir murder. However, since the government is not backing this application (and PPP spokesmen have been dismissive about it), it will probably not yield much. At the same time, because it expresses views of people that have not been satisfied, and who still have doubts about the murder, it will be part of the pressure that the UN investigators will feel about the whole affair, once they arrive. The application is also destined to play a role in how Pakistanis perceive the murder, which was by no means an ordinary event in the nation's chequered history, and which has still not been absorbed, though it will be two years old this December. It seems destined to join all the other unexplained deaths of leaders, starting with that of the Quaid-e-Azam himself, back in 1948.