Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician who served as Prime Minister of Pakistan twice (1988–1990 and 1993–1996), becoming the first woman to head a democratically elected government in a Muslim-majority country. She led the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), founded by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1979 after being deposed by General Zia-ul-Haq.
Educated at Harvard's Radcliffe College and at Oxford, where she was the first Asian woman to preside over the Oxford Union, Bhutto returned to Pakistan in the 1980s and led the PPP through years of opposition to military rule. After Zia's death in August 1988, she won general elections that November and took office at age 35.
Both of her terms were cut short on charges of corruption and misrule — her first government was dismissed by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1990 under the Eighth Amendment's Article 58(2)(b), and her second by President Farooq Leghari in 1996. She and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, faced extensive corruption allegations in Pakistan and abroad, including a Swiss money-laundering investigation.
Bhutto went into self-imposed exile in 1999, living in Dubai and London. In October 2007, after negotiating with President Pervez Musharraf — facilitated in part by the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which granted amnesty for past corruption cases — she returned to Pakistan to contest elections. A suicide bombing greeted her arrival in Karachi on 18 October 2007, killing roughly 140 people.
On 27 December 2007, she was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi. A UN commission of inquiry, reporting in April 2010, concluded her death could have been prevented and criticised the Musharraf government's security arrangements. Her husband Zardari subsequently became President (2008–2013), and their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari now chairs the PPP.
Bhutto remains a complex symbol: an icon for women's political leadership and democratic civilian rule, but also a figure whose tenures were marred by governance failures and corruption allegations.
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In October 2007, Benazir Bhutto returned from exile to Karachi to contest elections, two months before her assassination at a rally in Rawalpindi on 27 December 2007.