Benazir Bhutto

Twice Prime Minister of Pakistan, and the first woman to lead a modern Muslim country.

She was born at Karachi on the twenty-first of June 1953, the eldest child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She read at Harvard and then at Oxford, where she was president of the Union, and came home in 1977 intending an ordinary life in the foreign service.

Her father was overthrown by his own army chief that summer and hanged two years later. She and her mother were held under house arrest and in prison for most of the next five years - she spent long stretches in solitary confinement, some of it in a desert cell in summer. She went into exile in 1984 and came back in 1986 to a crowd in Lahore that is usually put at a million people.

She was elected Prime Minister in 1988 at thirty-five, dismissed in 1990 on corruption charges, elected again in 1993 and dismissed again in 1996. The charges followed her for the rest of her life and she denied them for the rest of her life. One of her brothers was poisoned in France; the other was shot dead by police outside the family house in Karachi while she was Prime Minister.

She came home again on the eighteenth of October 2007, after eight years away, to stand in an election. Two bombs went off at her homecoming procession in Karachi that night and killed at least a hundred and forty people. She was not hurt. She kept campaigning.

On the twenty-seventh of December she spoke at a rally at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi - the park where the country's first Prime Minister had been assassinated in 1951. Leaving it, she stood up through the sunroof of her car to wave at the crowd. She was fifty-four.

Her husband Asif Ali Zardari and their children Bilawal, Bakhtawar and Aseefa.