LAHORE: Two grandchildren of the late Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto have urged the chief justice of Pakistan to help them get their ailing grand mother – Begum Nusrat Bhutto – who is also the mother of Benazir Bhutto back to Pakistan so that she could get proper care medically as well emotionally and psychologically.
Begum Nusrat Bhutto became Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s successor as the chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) from 1979-1983. Nusrat Bhutto was born on September 21, 1929. She comes from the wealthy Hariri Esfahani family in Esfahan, Iran. The Kurdish connection comes from her grandmother who had married into the Hariri family Nusrat Bhutto is the daughter of a wealthy Iranian businessman who settled in Karachi, Pakistan. Nusrat met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Karachi where they got married on September 8, 1951. She was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s second marriage, and they had four children together, three of whom she has outlived.
In a letter to the chief justice, Fatima Bhutto and Zulfikar Junior have said their seriously sick grandmother was being held incommunicado by the family members of Pakistani President Asif Zardari in Dubai and was at the mercy of maids. They have maintained that she was not getting proper medical care and, therefore, the state authorities be directed to bring her to Pakistan and reunite with them so that she could live with family and get the much-needed emotional support, besides the necessary medical treatment. They said soon after the 1996 murder of their father Mir Murtaza Bhutto, their aunt Benazir Bhutto had come to take Begum Bhutto “for what she promised would be a short trip to New York to attend UN General Assembly session”.
Fatima Bhutto said she “argued with my late aunt that it was not safe for my grandmother to be unsettled as she had begun only recently to suffer the decline of Alzheimer’s and my father’s murder had strongly traumatised her”. Since then, she said, they had never, except for a brief 45-minute meeting, met her and her health was continuously deteriorating. The letter said: “My grandmother, no longer under her daughter’s care, is now being held incommunicado by the Zardaris in Dubai. It is this hold on my grandmother that the Zardaris have that that has dragged her good name into their corruption cases such as the Swiss SGS/Cotecna case which have placed her is the horrific position of being listed as a beneficiary of the criminal and unconstitutional NRO.”
Pointing out that none of Begum Bhutto’s direct family members, her daughter and grandchildren all living in London, were with her at present, they have urged the chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to direct the authorities so that she could be brought back here to be reunited with family and live with them in her house where she had been living earlier with her husband Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then her son and his family. However, circles close to Asif Zardari say Nusrat Bhutto is being looked after in UAE quite properly by her family, adding that she suffers from memory loss after she had suffered from the combined effects of a stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease.
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