“This is the end of Bhutto,” a supporter of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi said as the news broke that she had died on the operating table.

However, the family name may not be extinguished. Speculation will now intensify about whether her children or her niece, Fatima, could contemplate bearing the name of unmatched resonance into a political career. But the assassination of Ms Bhutto marks a bloody new entry in the family saga of violent death that took the lives of her father and brothers.

The most moving part of Ms Bhutto’s otherwise self-serving, grandiose and evasive autobiography Daughter of the East covers the death of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He founded the Pakistan People’s Party in 1967 with the slogan: “Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people.”

Like his daughter, he was a Shia and he appealed particularly to that fifth of the population of Pakistan that follows the Shia faith. He headed a wealthy family from Larkana, a rural town in Sindh province that, although it contains Karachi, the commercial and financial hub of the country, has always been the poor relation to the Punjab, two thirds of Pakistan by population and wealth.

Q&A: the murder of Benazir Bhutto

Times South Asia Correspondent asks who had most to gain from killing the Pakistan People's Party leader

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Ms Bhutto always mused whether “a girl from the Sindh” could really secure a place at the head of Pakistan’s politics; her Sindh origins at the same time underpinned her claim to represent the poor of Pakistan and left her outside the Punjab networks of the military and the Lahore commercial families.

No such worries inhibited her father, the son of a prominent political figure in the Indian colonial government. Mr Bhutto, who was President from 1971 to 1973, and Prime Minister from 1973 to 1977, was known as an autocratic leader, but was respected internationally, although he turned Pakistan away from its previous pro-US stance, advocated a hard line with India over Kashmir and founded the nuclear programme in Pakistan and tried to promote “pan-Islamic unity”. He was overthrown in 1977 by an army coup led by General Zia ul-Haq and was executed on April 4, 1979, aged 51, on charges of ordering the killing of an opponent, despite international appeals for clemency.

Ms Bhutto’s brother, Shahnawaz, was found dead in mysterious circumstances in his flat in the French Riviera. It is thought that he died of drug abuse, although the Bhutto family insists that he was poisoned.

In 1986 Ms Bhutto returned from exile to take on the leadership of the party to a rally of at least a million – a spontaneous expression of support and hope that, on her return this year, she tried hard to match.

Her other brother Murtaza, Har-vard-educated like Ms Bhutto, was a novice to politics until the death of his father. While Ms Bhutto moved to mainstream politics, he founded the Al-Zulfikar Organisation, which was rapidly viewed as a terrorist group. He was killed in a shootout with Karachi police near his house in 1996, the last year of Ms Bhutto’s tenure. He was her political rival and Fatima, his daughter, holds Ms Bhutto directly responsible for his death.

Fatima, a journalist based in Karachi, called Ms Bhutto “the most dangerous woman for Pakistan”, in an interview with The Times on Ms Bhutto’s return in October. She and other members of the Bhutto family were fiercely opposed to the elevation of Ms Bhutto as a champion of democracy, citing the corruption charges only recently quashed in Pakistan in a power-sharing deal with President Pervez Musharraf, and still being pursued in Swiss courts. Many have speculated that Fatima could enter politics, but she has always shrugged off such talk.

Other antagonistic members of the 700,000-strong Bhutto clan include the uncle of Ms Bhutto, who accused her of betraying the family name through her talks with President Musharraf.

Any hopes of the family of Ms Bhutto picking up the torch will rest on her three children, her son, Bilawal, 19, and daughters, Bakhtawar, 17, and Asi-fa, 14. Asif Ali Zardari, their father, said yesterday that he was travelling with them from the United Arab Emirates, where they have been living, to Karachi. Three years ago he told Pakistani newspapers of his hopes that they would join the youth wing of the PPP as the start of a political career, but their youth may mean that others in the family beat them to it.

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