Once hailed in Pakistan and abroad as a symbol of modernity and a champion of democracy, Benazir Bhutto has had a chequered political career. She has twice been Pakistan's Prime Minister, once between 1988 and 1990 and again between 1993 and 1996. Both times she was removed from her post over charges of corruption.

The fame of the Bhutto family name in Pakistan bears comparison with that of Gandhi in India. Benazir Bhutto's grandfather, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, was an influential pre-Independence politican, with close links to Governor-General Iskander Mirza, himself later the first President of Pakistan. Mrs Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the country's first Prime Minister and the founder of the party that his daughter now leads, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). The name he chose for his daughter means 'without comparison'.

Mrs Bhutto was educated at Harvard and Oxford, where she was President of the Oxford Union. She returned to Pakistan in 1977 just days before the overthrow of her father in a bloodless coup by General Zia-ul-Haq. Her father was executed two years later, and she was arrested and imprisoned, spending much of the next five years in solitary confinement in horrific conditions in a desert cell. She was released in 1984, and fled to London, from where she organised resistance to Zia-ul-Haq's military regime.

Mrs Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1986 to contest the elections announced by Zia-ul-Haq – she later accused him of timing the elections to coincide with her pregnancy to prevent her from campaigning. A million people reportedly met her at Lahore airport when she landed; as she says, "When I returned to Pakistan, I was held on a pedestal. I was neither man nor woman. I was regarded as a saint". Zia-ul-Haq was killed in an air crash before the elections took place, and in 1988 the PPP won 94 out of the 207 seats in the National Assembly. Mrs Bhutto's manifesto was left-leaning, including provision of food for the hungry, health care, slum clearance and a minimum wage. How far she achieved those goals in either of her terms is open to debate.

Just two years after her election, however, Mrs Bhutto was dismissed by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Zia-ul-Haq's democratically-elected successor, on charges of corruption. She remained leader of the party, which resoundingly lost the subsequent elections, but her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was arrested and imprisoned for two years. He was accused of attaching a remote-controlled bomb to the leg of a Pakistani businessman and forcing him to hand over money. The charges were never proven, and when the PPP regained power in 1993 after an anti-corruption drive ordered by Mrs Bhutto he was released and appointed to the cabinet as Investment Minister.

Further charges of corruption, however, were levelled at Asif Ali Zardari by Mrs Bhutto's estranged brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, whose subsequent death in a gunfight with police officers in Karachi was also seen as suspicious. A number of Mrs Bhutto's rivals died in separate but similar incidents. In October 1996 street demonstrations against the PPP shut down large parts of Islamabad, and Mrs Bhutto came under further criticism for arresting rival party leaders who participated in the demonstrations. In November 1996 President Farooq Leghari dismissed Mrs Bhutto and charged her husband with receiving bribes and kickbacks as well as with tax evasion and extra-judicial killings.

Mrs Bhutto herself faces more than a dozen corruption cases relating to her time in office, including allegedly giving 800 of her supporters jobs at the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines. Amnesty International accuses her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture .

Among the transactions Zardari allegedly exploited were defence contracts, power plant projects, the privatisation of state-owned industries, the awarding of broadcast licences, the granting of an export monopoly for the country's huge rice harvest, the granting of oil and gas permits, and the sale of government lands.

President Musharraf once told Mrs Bhutto that she would be arrested if she returned to Pakistan – it now looks as if charges against her, and the efforts to track down the estimated $1.5bn she and her husband received in commissions and kickbacks, may be dropped in return for her political support.

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