Adil Najam

Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan, now lies under six feet of earth in Garhi Khuda Bux, her ancestral village, in a grave next to her equally mercurial father, the late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

As the graphic above (click to enlarge) from Boston Globe shows, hers – like her father’s – was a brilliant but tragic life. Tragically ended.

Now she is buried. But I suspect that the Benazir saga is far from over. Indeed, just as all of Pakistan’s politics after Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s hanging was contextualized by his hanging, all of Pakistan’s politics after Benazir’s assasination is likely to be contextualized by Benazir’s assasination.

Adil Najam

Whatever her opponents may think of her, Benazir Bhutto was a most recognized and much-loved international figure. An icon in the best sense of the word. The shock of her death – and the manner of her death – was not confined to Pakistan. As comments on our earlier post suggests, in that moment, the entire world stopped in its tracks. It was not just the most tragic of moments, but also a most historic moment.

These are the pictures of the front pages from just a few newspapers from across the United States and across the world. They are but a fraction of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of newspaper front pages that mourned her death. They make a fitting tribute to a woman who served twice as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, but was also a global citizen in heart and in spirit.

Regular readers of ATP know our fascination with newspaper front pages, which we feature often as pictures in our political posts. But credit for this fine collection goes to the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) who have featured this collection (ATP added a few images) on SAJA Forum. My gratitude to them for this, please do visit the SAJA page where you can click on each of the front pages images for more detail in them. Additional images of international newspapers were found at another wonderful post here.

Adil Najam

News is just breaking that former Prime Minister and head of the Pakistan People’s Party, Benazir Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi in a terrorist attack.

She was gunned down by an assassin who then blew himself up in a suicide attack. This happened at the end of her rally in Liaquat Bagh, Rawalpindi; the same place where Liaqat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister was assassinated. Major news networks are now reporting that following bomb blasts at Benazir Bhutto’s rally in Rawalpindi, shots were fired directly targeting her. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari says that one of these shots hit her in the neck and killed her.