Fatima Bhutto, the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, has once again accused her uncle, Asif Ali Zardari, of ordering the murder of her father in a police shoot out in 1996.
This time, the accusation comes out in her book Songs of Blood and Sword. While releasing her book in Karachi on Tuesday, Fatima recalled the incident in which her father was killed along with his party activists. She recalled that her father was shot several times “to make sure he was dead.”
She also expressed her discontent at President Zardari’s acquittal from Murtaza Bhutto’s murder case in these words,
“Zardari had bypassed the courts’ standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father’s murder. There was no point in appealing, he was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he operated; justice was always the first casualty.”
Bhutto also claimed that Zardari deliberately changed the date of his oath taking ceremony as president so that it would coincide with Murtaza Bhutto’s death anniversary.
“He paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark his brother-in-law’s death. My blood froze. It was as if he was taunting us. But that would be nothing compared to what would follow. On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as president he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz… [and] was then made head of the Federal Investigation Bureau,” Bhutto writes.
{{/usCountry}}“He paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark his brother-in-law’s death. My blood froze. It was as if he was taunting us. But that would be nothing compared to what would follow. On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as president he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz… [and] was then made head of the Federal Investigation Bureau,” Bhutto writes.
{{/usCountry}}Fatima Bhutto has also openly stated that her father never liked Zardari.