Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto (Sindhi: بينظير ڀٽو;

Benzair Bhutto ; 21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistan-born politician, with Pakistani and Kurdish-Iranian origin, who chaired the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), a centre-left and the largest political party in Pakistan.

Bhutto was the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state, having twice been Prime Minister of Pakistan (1988–1990; 1993–1996).

She was Pakistan's first and to date only female prime minister and was the eldest child of former Prime minister of Pakistan Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and former First Lady of Pakistan Mrs.Nusrat Bhutto, and was the wife of current President of Pakistan Mr. Asif Ali Zardari.

Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister for the first time in 1988 at the age of 35, but was removed from office 20 months later under the order of then-President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on grounds of alleged corruption. In 1993 she was re-elected but was again removed in 1996 on similar charges, this time by her party's elected President Farooq Leghari. She went into self-imposed exile in Dubai in 1998.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan on October 18th 2007, after reaching an understanding with President Pervez Musharraf by which she was granted amnesty and all corruption charges were withdrawn.

She was assassinated on 27 December 2007, after departing a PPP rally in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 in which she was a leading opposition candidate.

In 2008 she was named one of seven winners of the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.

Urdu: بینظیر بھٹو)