The seeds for the family’s brush with tragedy were sown when Benazir’s father and former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged on April 4, 1979. Bhutto’s end came after worldwide appeals for clemency were dismissed by the then acting President Gen Zia ul Haq. The family was enveloped in tragedy within a year when Bhutto’s brother Shahnawaz was killed under suspicious circumstances in France.
The killing of another of her brothers Mir Murtaza in 1996 contributed to destabilising her second term as prime minister.
Referring to her blood-stained family history, Bhutto wrote in the introduction to her memoir Daughter of the East that “I didn’t choose this life, it chose me.”
“Born in Pakistan, my life mirrors its turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs,” said Bhutto, who was the eldest of her four children of her Westernished father and an Iranian Shiite mother. It was revenge of sorts for Bhutto on August 17, 1988, when her father’s executioner — Zia ul Haq — died in a mysterious plane crash.
