Pakistan's besieged government continued to insist Saturday that Taliban militants assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as skepticism and anger mounted among her supporters, the media and general public.

As Bhutto supporters continued to riot and protest across the country and publicly claim that President Pervez Mussharraf's government killed Bhutto, Interior Ministry was forced to call its second press conference in two days on Saturday night after a Taliban spokesman denied involvement in the gun-suicide bomb attack on Thursday in the city of Rawalpindi.

"Why should he accept that he has done it?" said Interior spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema. "I don't think anyone else has the ability to recruit and carry out those kinds of attacks."

Cheema also stood by the government's claims that Bhutto died after slamming her head against the sunroof of her Range Rover as she fell from the bomb impact, and was not shot in the head, chest and neck as asserted by multiple witnesses and her senior aides.

"It is immaterial how she died," he told journalists. "What is more important is, who are the people who killed her? I think we have to uncover those people."

The government's claims found little credibility among angry Bhutto supporters who continued to destroy government buildings, election commission offices, banks, vehicles and other property in riots that have killed more than 30 people, mostly in Bhutto's home province of Sindh.

The Taliban personally contacted media agencies to refute government claims that law enforcement agencies had intercepted a telephone call which proved that Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the newly-formed Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement Pakistan), was behind the attack.

"The government is trying to defame the tribesmen," Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the militants, told the BBC's Urdu Service by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan is an umbrella organization of several Islamic militant groups in the country's ungoverned tribal areas, where thousands of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters sough refuge after US invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Its leader Mehsud is also believed to have close ties with al-Qaeda.

Pakistan's extremist groups were believed to be enraged over the Bush administration's efforts to broker an alliance between Musharraf and the popular Bhutto to create a stable, civilian-run government in the nuclear-armed state and increase the fight against Islamic militancy emanating from the volatile tribal belt.

But Omar claimed Benazir Bhutto's murder was a political matter.

"There is a very strong possibility that the (country's) intelligence agencies were behind the attack," he said, adding that the murder seemed to be the continuation of the same political feud between the Bhutto family and the military through which her father and two brothers were killed.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, was ousted as prime minister in 1977 by military dictator Zia ul Haq and later hanged. His sons Shahnawaz Bhutto and Murtza Bhutto both also died under mysterious circumstances in the following years. Bhutto supporters blamed the country's intelligence agencies for their deaths.

Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) dismissed the claims that the Taliban was responsible as "a pack of lies," noting that the government had also blamed Mehsud for a suicide attack on Bhutto two months ago on her return home from exile which killed 140 people.

"We do not know if it is a genuine transcript or one crafted in a dark room by the intelligence agencies," party spokesman Farhatullah Babar said of the electronic intercept of Mehud.

The government has given wildly conflicting statements in the last two days on how Bhutto was killed and whether the assassin had fired shots at her before blowing himself up.

"It was a targeted killing by a sharpshooter," Babar insisted, demanding "the same sort of international inquiry into the murder" of Bhutto as was conducted in after the car bomb assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005.