Benazir Bhutto

The couple had married in September 1951, and Benazir was their first child.

She was given the name of an aunt who had died young.

Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman who served as the 11th and 13th prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996.

She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country.

Bhutto was born at Pinto's Nursing Home on 21 June 1953 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.

Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani.

The latter was born in Isfahan, Persia (now Iran) to a wealthy Persian merchant family of partial Kurdish descent.

Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State.

The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh, part of the waderos or landed gentry.

They were Shia Muslims.

Benazir, in her autobiography "Daughter of the East", said "The diaries of one of our ancestors, giving the family details, were washed away in a great flood in my great-grandfather's time. But as children, we were told we were either descended from the Rajputs...or from the Arabs who entered India through our home province of Sindh in AD 712."

Some say that Benazir Bhutto is descended from the Arains, a Muslim tribe of Punjab, who have a subclan called Bhutta, and they also claim to be descended from the Arabs who entered India in AD 712 while others say that Benazir is descended from the Rajputs.

The Bhuttos' three younger children were Murtaza (born 1954), Sanam (1957), and Shahnawaz (1958).

When the elderly Shah Nawaz died in 1957, Zulfikar inherited the family's land holdings, making him extremely wealthy.

Benazir's first language was English; as a child she spoke Urdu less frequently although she was fluent, and barely spoke the local Sindhi language.

Her mother taught her some Persian as a child.

Benazir initially attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School in Karachi.

Her father, the PPP leader Zulfikar Bhutto, was elected prime minister on a socialist platform in 1973.

She returned to Pakistan in 1977, shortly before her father was ousted in a military coup and executed.

Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007.

Of mixed Sindhi and Kurdish parentage, Bhutto was born in Karachi to a politically important, wealthy aristocratic family.

She studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she was President of the Oxford Union.

Bhutto and her mother Nusrat took control of the PPP and led the country's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy; Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's military government and then self-exiled to Britain in 1984.

She returned in 1986 and—influenced by Thatcherite economics—transformed the PPP's platform from a socialist to a liberal one, before leading it to victory in the 1988 election.

As prime minister, her attempts at reform were stifled by conservative and Islamist forces, including President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the powerful military.

Her administration was accused of corruption and nepotism and dismissed by Khan in 1990.

Intelligence services rigged that year's election to ensure a victory for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance (IJI), at which point Bhutto became Leader of the Opposition.

After the IJI government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was also dismissed on corruption charges, Bhutto led the PPP to victory in the 1993 elections.

In her second term, she oversaw economic privatisation and attempts to advance women's rights.

Her government was damaged by several controversies, including the assassination of her brother Murtaza, a failed 1995 coup d'état, and a further bribery scandal involving her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari; in response, President Farooq Leghari dismissed her government.

The PPP lost the 1997 election and in 1998 she went into self-exile, living between Dubai and London for the next decade.

A widening corruption inquiry culminated in a 2003 conviction in a Swiss court.

Following the United States–brokered negotiations with then President, general Pervez Musharraf, she returned to Pakistan in 2007 to compete in the 2008 elections; her platform emphasised civilian oversight of the military and opposition to growing Islamist violence.

After a political rally in Rawalpindi, she was assassinated.

The Salafi jihadi group al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, although the involvement of the Pakistani Taliban and rogue elements of the intelligence services was widely suspected.

She was buried at her family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Baksh.

Bhutto was a controversial figure who remains divisive.

She was often criticised as being politically inexperienced, was accused of being corrupt, and faced much opposition from Pakistan's Islamist lobby for her secularist and modernising agenda.

In the early years of her career, she was nevertheless domestically popular and also attracted support from the international community, seen as a champion of democracy.

Posthumously, she came to be regarded as an icon for women's rights due to her political success in a male-dominated society.