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 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