--- alias: - Benazir category: Political Figure created: 2026-09-23 died: 2007-12-27 relations: - fn: 1 role: daughter type: relative_of with: '[[Zulfikar Ali Bhutto]]' - fn: 2 type: spouse_of with: '[[Asif Ali Zardari]]' - end: 1990 fn: 2 role: prime minister, first term start: 1988 type: head_of with: '[[Pakistan]]' - end: 1996 fn: 2 role: prime minister, second term start: 1993 type: head_of with: '[[Pakistan]]' - end: 2007-12-27 fn: 2 role: leader type: head_of with: '[[Pakistan People''s Party]]' summary: Daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party and twice prime minister of Pakistan, assassinated at a Rawalpindi election rally on December 27, 2007. tags: - Person - Pakistan - PakistanPeoplesParty - Assassination updated: 2026-09-23 --- Benazir Bhutto was the daughter of [Zulfikar Ali Bhutto](/people/zulfikar-ali-bhutto/), the [Pakistani](/places/pakistan/) prime minister whom [Zia ul-Haq](/people/zia-ul-haq/) deposed in 1977 and hanged in 1979, and the leader of his [Pakistan People's Party](/organizations/pakistan-peoples-party/) (PPP). She was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996, the first woman to head the government of an Islamic state, and was dismissed twice by the president on corruption charges. She was killed in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, as she left an election rally.[^1][^2] ### Opposition to Zia She and her mother visited her father in Rawalpindi jail at 11:30 on the morning of April 3, 1979, without knowing the day or hour of his execution, and she spent the night that followed confined and apart from him; he was hanged shortly after two the next morning.[^3] She returned to Pakistan in April 1986 after two years of self-imposed exile, vowing to remove Zia and restore democracy; hundreds of thousands of supporters met her, but she did not gather enough support to topple him. On August 17, 1988, the day Zia died, she filed a petition in the Supreme Court of Pakistan asking that the elections he had called for November 16 be held on a party basis. Told of the crash that killed him, she said: "Life and death are in God's hands and we should accept it as such. There were apprehensions that martial law might have been imposed after the death of Zia, but the constitutional path has been followed and that augurs well for the country."[^1] ### Governments The acting president who announced Zia's death, [Ghulam Ishaq Khan](/people/ghulam-ishaq-khan/), had been deputy defense minister under her father and Zia's minister of finance from 1977 to 1984.[^1] He became president after Zia, having served, according to the [Kerry-Brown Senate report](/events/bcci-kerry-brown-senate-report/), as chairman of the BCCI Foundation in Pakistan throughout the 1980s. She became prime minister later in 1988.[^1][^4] She ordered the arrest of General [Fazle Haq](/people/fazle-haq/), the former governor of the North-West Frontier Province, on drug charges; the journalists [Jonathan Beaty](/people/jonathan-beaty/) and [S. C. Gwynne](/people/s-c-gwynne/) wrote that she meant it as a demonstration of action against the drug trade and that the charges disappeared after the generals removed her from power.[^5] ### Return and Assassination She spent five years in prison and later lived outside Pakistan, where she faced corruption charges. In October 2007 she returned under a power-sharing agreement with President Pervez Musharraf, who had granted an amnesty covering the court cases against her; on the day of her arrival a double suicide attack on her motorcade through [Karachi](/places/karachi/) killed about 130 people. In 2006 she had formed an alliance with another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.[^2] On December 27, 2007, after addressing a rally in Rawalpindi's Liaqat Bagh park ahead of elections set for January 8, she was shot in the neck and chest as her convoy left by the rear gate onto Murree Road, and the gunman then detonated a bomb. At least 20 other people died. She was pronounced dead at Rawalpindi General Hospital at 18:16 local time. It was the second suicide attack against her in recent months. Musharraf declared three days of mourning; Sharif announced that his party would boycott the elections and called on Musharraf to resign. Protests in the PPP's home province of Sindh left at least 11 dead, four of them in Karachi, where more than 100 cars were burned. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, flew in from [Dubai](/places/dubai/) to escort her coffin, which was flown to Sukkur for burial in her home town, Larkana.[^2] She was educated at [Harvard](/organizations/harvard-university/) and Oxford.[^2] [^1]: Barnetson, Denholm. "President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel and...," United Press International, August 17, 1988. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/08/17/President-Mohammad-Zia-ul-Haq-US-Ambassador-Arnold-Raphel-and/3467587793600/ [^2]: "Benazir Bhutto killed in attack," BBC News, December 27, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7161590.stm [^3]: Aziz, Shaikh. "A leaf from history: The prime minister is hanged," *Dawn*, February 1, 2015. https://www.dawn.com/news/1160422 [^4]: Kerry, Senator John, and Senator Hank Brown. *The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate.* December 1992, ch. 5, "BCCI's Relationship with Foreign Governments, Central Banks, and International Organizations," section "Pakistan." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/05foreign.htm [^5]: Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. *The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI*. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 75.