Benazir Bhutto whom she was a champion of democracy and women's rights. Bhutto was born on 21 June 1953 in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani, of Iranian Kurdish parentage. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh. They were Sunni Muslims, although Nusrat had been born into a Shia Muslim family before converting to Sunnism on her marriage. The couple had married in September 1951, and
Benazir Bhutto had reasons for wanting Bhutto dead; her killing was advantageous to both the military establishment and to the Islamic fundamentalists who despised her. Allen thought that Bhutto's "core political values... were hard to pin down". Bhatia described Bhutto as having "liberal convictions" and a "self-evidently progressive outlook", while biographer G. S. Bhargava thought that in the context of Pakistani politics, she could "pass" for a social democrat. Her friend Catherine Drucker, who knew her at Oxford, noted that at the time Bhutto's political views were akin to those "commonplace" within the "mild leftism of the day". Bhargava added that, through