December 27, 2007

Liaquat Bagh is the park in Rawalpindi where Liaquat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, was shot dead at a public meeting in 1951. She spoke there on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of December 2007, campaigning for an election due in a fortnight.

She had survived an attempt ten weeks earlier - two bombs at her homecoming procession in Karachi that killed at least a hundred and forty people in the crowd around her. She had written to the government naming who she thought would try again.

She left the rally at about five past five in an armoured Toyota, and stood up through the sunroof to wave to the people running alongside. A man in the crowd fired three shots and then detonated a vest. More than twenty other people were killed.

She was taken to Rawalpindi General and pronounced dead at a quarter past six. She was fifty-four. Her husband refused a post-mortem.

The site was hosed down within hours, before anything could be recovered from it. A United Nations commission later found the investigation had been deliberately obstructed and that the police had failed her. Her son Bilawal, nineteen and at Oxford, was made chairman of her party three days later.

She is buried beside her father at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh.