By DPA
Islamabad : In a will written just weeks before her assassination in late December, Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto urged her supporters to continue fighting terrorism and dictatorship, a local news report said Tuesday.
In a message written two days before she returned home from self-exile on Oct 18, 2007, Bhutto wrote that she feared for Pakistan’s future amid continued military rule and growing Islamic militancy.
The two-page hand-written letter, whose contents were reported by DawnNews TV, made no mention of Bhutto’s personal assets or how they should be divided. But members of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) were referring to the document as a will.
“I salute your courage and sense of honour. I salute you for standing by your sister through two military dictatorships,” Bhutto wrote.
“Please continue the fight against terrorism, dictatorship, poverty and ignorance,” she wrote. “I wish you success in fulfilling the manifesto of our party and in serving the downtrodden, discriminated and oppressed people of Pakistan.”
In the will, Bhutto appointed her husband Asif Ali Zardari as interim leader until he “decides what is best” for the country’s largest political party, calling him “a man of courage and honour” and saying he would bind the PPP together.
In the days following Bhutto’s slaying in a gun and suicide bombing attack on Dec 27, Zardari revealed that Bhutto had tapped him to take over, but he and other PPP leaders named their 19-year-old son Bilawal to be the party’s titular chairman until he finishes his studies at Oxford.
The Bhutto family was scheduled to read the will during a televised press conference at 5 p.m. local time (1200 GMT) at the family’s ancestral home in Naudero, Sindh province, where Benazhir Bhutto was buried the day after her assassination.
Prior to her death, Bhutto said in an e-mail to her US-based spokesman that she would hold Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf responsible if she were killed after returning home to seek an unprecedented third term as prime minister in forthcoming elections.
She also wrote in an autobiography written prior to her death that she had been warned that suicide bomb squads, including one led by the son of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, were targeting her.
Musharraf’s government, which was forced to postpone the polls until Feb 18 and whose popularity has plummeted since Bhutto’s slaying, claims a militant Taliban commander in the country’s lawless tribal areas with ties to Al Qaeda was behind her assassination.