Benazir Bhutto

Born in Karachi in 1953 to the aristocratic Bhutto family, she studied at Harvard and Oxford - where she led the Oxford Union - then returned in 1977 just as her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's socialist government fell to a military coup and he was executed. She and her mother took control of the Pakistan People's Party, endured repeated imprisonment under Zia-ul-Haq, and fled to Britain in 1984. Back in 1986, she shifted the party from socialist to liberal and won the 1988 election, but conservative forces and the military stifled her reforms; accused of corruption, she was dismissed in 1990. She returned to power in 1993, pushed privatisation and women's rights, survived a coup attempt and her brother Murtaza's assassination, then was dismissed again in 1996 amid bribery charges involving her husband Asif Ali Zardari. A decade in exile, a Swiss conviction in 2003, then U.S.-brokered talks brought her home in 2007 to campaign on civilian control and against Islamist violence. She was shot after a rally in Rawalpindi in December; al-Qaeda claimed it, though suspicions also reached the Pakistani Taliban and intelligence. She was buried at the family mausoleum in Ga