By IANS
Islamabad : Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated Thurday, is survived by her mother Nusrat, sister Sanam, husband Asif Ali Zardari and her three children – Bilawal, Bakhtawar and Assefa.
The couple had wed in 1987 and the children are aged 19, 17 and 14 respectively.
Asked in a recent TV interview what she thought of her family, she replied: “I am lucky to have a good husband and good children.”
In fact, she doted on her children, fiercely guarded their privacy and closely followed their education and guided their upbringing. She resisted previous calls for return to Pakistan, saying her children, still young, needed a mother.
It was only when they entered their teens that she agreed to make her plunge again in the hurly-burly of Pakistan’s troubled politics – only to fall a victim to it.
In many ways, Benazir’s family could be said to be star-crossed. Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979 after being found guilty of plotting a rival politicians’ murder.
Nusrat Bhutto, now 78, was imprisoned after her husband was hanged but was later permitted to leave the country for treatment in London, where her daughters Benazir and Sanam later joined her.
In 1985, Benazir’s youngest brother Shahnawaz, then 27, was found dead in his French Riviera apartment in Nice. He could have died of the drug abuse but the Bhutto family insists that he was murdered by poisoning. No one has brought to trial for the murder.
In 1996, Benazir’s younger brother Murtaza, 42, was shot and killed in Karachi along with six supporters during an altercation with the police. The police said that Murtaza and his supporters had refused to allow them to search their vehicles as part of security measures in force in the city.
The incident soured relations between Benazir and Murtaza’s widow Ghinwa, who then began charting an independent political course.
Ghinwa’s daughter Fatima had publicly termed as a “disaster” Benazir’s return to Pakistan.