By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : Some sections of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) are trying to convince former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s sister Sanam to take over the reins of the party while others favour her husband Asif Zardari instead.
Sanam Bhutto, the only surviving child of the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, lives in London and reached their ancestral home of Larkana in Sindh to attend the funeral prayers of her sister who was assassinated after addressing a rally in Rawalpindi Thursday evening.
According to PPP leaders, some were rooting for Sanam to take over leadership of the party. But there was also a section that was pinning their hopes on her brother-in-law and Benazir’s husband Zardari, who landed in Pakistan with his three children, after midnight Thursday.
Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto is the fourth member of her family to die unnatural death and third in the Bhutto dynasty to die as a politician.
In 1979, Zia-ul-Haq hung Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto two years after his government was overthrown in a military coup.
In 1986, her 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.
And on Thursday evening, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was brutally killed while she was leaving a campaign rally in Rawalpindi.