Murtaza Bhutto Murtaza Bhutto Mir Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto (18 September 1954 – 20 September 1996) was a Pakistani politician. He was the son of former Pakistani PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Iranian Kurdish wife Nusrat. He started the criminal organization Al-Zulfiqar after his father was overthrown and executed in 1979 by General Zia-ul-Haq. He moved to Afghanistan as a fugitive and was sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal. He returned to Pakistan in 1993 and was arrested for terrorism on the orders of his sister, then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Released on bail, Murtaza successfully contested elections to the
Benazir Bhutto insufficiently committed to socialism and fearing that the party would become nothing more than a Bhutto family fiefdom. Murtaza believed that it was he, and not Benazir, who was their father's designated political heir; as evidence, he cited that he had been asked to manage his father's Larkana constituency in the 1977 general election. Bhutto biographer Shyam Bhatia thought that this was probably Zulfikar's intention, as the latter would have recognised the significant impediments to a woman being elected leader in a conservative Islamic society like Pakistan. Benazir nevertheless maintained that her father had always wanted her to become a