Former Pakistani PM Benazirs'son Bilawal Bhutto to contest in elections

Reuters - Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, born on September 21, 1988 in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, is a Pakistani politician who has been serving as the Chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) since December 2007. He is the eldest child and only son of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, the former President of Pakistan. His siblings are Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari and Aseefa Bhutto Zardari. He is also the grandson of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan. He studied at the Christ Church, Oxford University where he received his Bachelor and Masters degrees. He left Pakistan with his mother and sisters in April 1999. He spent his childhood in Dubai and London during his family's self-exile. His mother Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007 when he was just entering university. Bilawal assumed chairmanship of the PPP on December 30, 2007, three days after his mother was killed, with his father as co-chairman. Bilawal made his official political debut on December 27, 2012 -- the fifth-year anniversary of his mother's assassination -- in his mother's southern hometown province of Sindh and staged numerous rallies. He denounced the courts for what he said was the slow pace of the trial of his mother's alleged killers. Benazir Bhutto's killer has never been caught and a U.N. inquiry found that Pakistani authorities had failed to protect her or properly investigate her death. The Pakistan People's Party ruled the country from 2008 to 2013, but it became tarnished by a series of confrontations with the powerful Supreme Court over corruption scandals. In 2014, the scion of one of Pakistan's leading political dynasties vowed to resurrect the party's flagging fortunes. Bilawal told Reuters that he planned a series of rallies in a challenge to Pakistan's embattled prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan's next general elections will on July 25, 2018. Bilawal will contest for a seat on the National Assembly (lower house of parliament) from his ancestral town of Larkana and the southern city of Karachi.