Bhutto: A life devoted to Pakistan
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Thursday, December 27th 2007, 12:45 PM
There was a sense of the inevitable when Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan two months ago. She spoke frankly of the dangers ahead as she moved to regain political power in the land where she had served as its first female prime minister.
And she faced them without fear.
"These are risks that must be taken," she said just before her homecoming. "I'm prepared to take them."
After eight years in self-imposed exile from Pakistan, she came home on Oct. 18 - and it took just hours for her precarious position to become frighteningly clear. That day, she narrowly escaped injury in a suicide attack that killed more than 140 people in Karachi.
She heard reports of other assassination plots, and a November rally in the city of Rawalpindi was canceled over security concerns.
Bhutto met her supporters this morning in Rawalpindi, where she was killed during another suicide attack. A gunman opened fire on her motorcade as Bhutto waved to supporters from a sunroof. A bomb blast then killed at least 20 others.
The charismatic Bhutto, whose father was hanged in their homeland after a late '70s military coup, led a life blotted with bloodshed and controversy. Bhutto, 54, was the daughter of former Pakistani president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He was executed in 1979, two years after his government was ousted.
One of her brothers died in 1980, with the family insisting he was poisoned. A second brother was killed during a 1996 shootout with police in Karachi.
Her father sent Bhutto to study at Harvard and Oxford, and she returned to their homeland after his death with a promise to continue his work. She served twice as Pakistan's prime minister between 1988 and 1996.
She left Pakistan in 1999, just prior to a corruption conviction. She and her husband of 20 years raised their three children in Great Britain and Dubai as they monitored the volatile situation in Pakistan.
The corruption verdict was eventually overturned, but Bhutto did not return until President Pervez Musharraf granted her amnesty.
Bhutto, as leader of the opposition, appeared headed for a showdown with Musharraf in the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections. She filed a nomination paper for a seat last month, and offered supporters a defiant greeting at a recent rally.
"Bhutto is alive!" she had shouted. "Bhutto is alive!"
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