“There are precedents in Pakistan for such international assistance. Such teams were called in to investigate the mysterious and sudden death of Army Chief General Asif Nawaz and the Egyptian Embassy bombing in the ‘90s,” Bhutto said.

She had called in international experts when her brother Murtaza was killed in what she said: “I believed was a conspiracy to destabilise my government in 1996.”

But she absolved President Pervez Musharraf of a hand in it, saying the “sham” investigation of the massacre and the attempt by the ruling party to politically capitalise on this catastrophe are discomforting, but do not suggest his direct involvement.

It has now been more than two weeks since the “horrific assassination attempt” against her and the police have still not filed her complaint, she said, adding that they filed their own report without taking statements from eyewitnesses.

“Soon thereafter, I was asked by authorities not to travel in cars with tinted windows — which protected me from identification by terrorists — or travel with privately armed guards,” Bhutto said. “I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing,” she wrote.