In the case of her siblings, Benazir was fondest of her younger sister, Sanam, who is still alive and lives in London, and her younger brother, the late Shahnawaz Bhutto, who died in mysterious circumstances in Cannes in 1985. The Pakistani authorities at the time attributed his death to alcohol and drug abuse. The Bhuttos believe he was poisoned at the behest of the Pakistani military.
More fraught were her relations with the other brother, Murtaza, who died in a police shoot-out in Karachi in 1996 during Benazir’s second term as prime minister. He was only a year younger than his sister and, like Benazir, he too went to Oxford where he was enrolled in a post-graduate degree to examine Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Both he and I shared the same tutor in Sir Michael Howard, then the Regius Professor of Modern History.
Our paths would cross all too often, either when I was leaving Sir Michael’s room at All Souls after a tutorial, or when Murtaza was entering. Out of hours we occasionally had a drink and exchanged jokes about where India and Pakistan were heading with their nuclear ambitions.
Nevertheless, it was a bit of a shock to come across Murtaza more than a decade later in the bar of the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus. So much had happened since our Oxford days. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been overthrown and hanged, Murtaza and Shahnawaz had subsequently hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Karachi during which a hostage was killed, resulting in both brothers being sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal. Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, was himself killed in a mysterious air crash in 1988, paving the way for democratic elections and Benazir taking over as her country’s elected prime minister.
All this was racing through my mind as I watched Murtaza walking towards the bar where we, a group of visiting foreign correspondents, were huddled. Murtaza was a bit of a side show that evening because the focus of the visiting foreign media’s interest was the fate of Western hostages, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy Terry Waite, held by Hizbollah across the border in neighbouring Lebanon.
Hizbollah’s tactic was to release the hostages into the hands of Syrian officials who would bring them to Damascus and produce them in front of the media. That evening in December 1988 we were waiting for news of another hostage release when Murtaza, splendidly turned out in brown trousers and jacket with a bright red waistcoat, suddenly came into view.
He was only thirty-four, but seemed both older and heavier as I walked across to where he was standing and inquired, ‘Murtaza?’ Quick as flash, he pulled out a pistol, pushed it against my forehead and shouted, ‘Who wants to know?’ Journalists are not usually experts in firearms and from where I was standing, it was not possible to make out the make or type of pistol pressed hard against me. Around me all conversation stopped and there was pindrop silence until I responded in frightened Urdu, ‘Have you gone mad?’
Slowly, he lowered the pistol, responding, ‘Oh, Shyam, didn’t recognize you.’
Frightened by his extraordinary reaction, I made my excuses and left as quickly as I could for my room on the third floor. Five minutes later there was a banging on the door. It was Murtaza. ‘Come down,’ he shouted from outside. ‘I want to talk to you.’ When I told him I wanted to sleep, he answered, ‘I’ll keep banging on your door until you agree.’ By now it was 11 p.m. and, concerned by how other hotel guests might react, I finally agreed to meet him downstairs.
Downstairs on the ground floor, in a small side room next to the bar, Murtaza was in charge of a pool table, surrounded by a couple of Syrian security men, a visiting male cousin from Pakistan and a slim woman in a shiny dress and even shinier sequins dotted all over. This was Ghinwa, his Lebanese girlfriend, a former ballet dancer and his future second wife. She didn’t say very much, just smiled a lot and occasionally laughed as we took our turns at the pool table.
Murtaza was also drinking heavily. A jumbo bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label sat on the side of the table, from which he refilled his glass (and mine) every few minutes while he raved about the late General Zia, who had died only a few months earlier.
‘Bastard’ and ‘cobra eyes’ were just a few of the epithets that Murtaza used in his recollections of Zia, whom he accused of murdering his father. ‘You’re a reporter,’ he went on. ‘Write all this down. He tried to have me killed as well.’
‘Luckily for you he’s dead and gone,’ I told him. ‘How fortunate that the country has had elections and your sister Benazir is about to be sworn in as prime minister.’ There was silence. Ghinwa, the security guards and the visiting cousin—all stopped talking. Clearly, this was a sensitive subject. Murtaza’s body language—the way he shrugged his shoulders—suggested he was not on the best of terms with the incoming prime minister.
My recollection from fifteen years earlier at Oxford was of a brother and sister who got on reasonably well. True they went to different colleges, had their own sets of friends and were pursuing different types of degrees—Benazir opting for a second undergraduate degree after Harvard, while Murtaza was looking for a post-graduate B.Litt leading to a D.Phil—but there was genuine affection between brother and sister.
All that, however, was a long time ago. In Damascus that evening, as I brought out my reporter’s notebook, Murtaza spat out sheer venom about Benazir. ‘What did you say about that bitch?’ he asked.
