Bilawal seeks justice for his grandfather & ex-PM Zulfikar Bhutto’s ‘murder’

Peshawar: Bilawal-Bhutto Zardari on Wednesday sought justice for the “murder” of his grandfather and Pakistan’s former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a day after the Supreme Court questioned the maintainability of a long-pending case seeking to revisit the controversial death penalty handed out to him in 1979.

While hearing the case on Tuesday, a nine-member larger bench of the apex court headed by Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, observed that the matter about the trial of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) founder had attained finality as a review petition had been dismissed earlier, so how can the apex court reopen the case that has already been concluded.

The court adjourned till January 2024 the hearing of the case, which was filed by former Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari on April 2, 2011, for an opinion on revisiting the death sentence handed to Bhutto, his father-in-law, under the Supreme Court’s advisory jurisdiction.

Bhutto, 51, was hanged to death in 1979 after he was convicted of abetment in a murder case. The execution was carried out after a seven-member Supreme Court upheld the conviction, which many believe was done under coercion exercised by the then military dictator Gen Ziaul Haq who had toppled Bhutto’s government in 1977.

Addressing lawyers at the Peshawar High Court Bar Association, Bilawal, now the Chairman of the PPP, said: “I want to ask you a few questions of law as I was asked that you are pleading this [ZA Bhutto] reference but what’s your question of law.”

“My question of law is that can the judiciary commit a murder or become co-accused in committing a murder,” the PPP chief was quoted as saying by Geo News.

Bilawal, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, questioned the “statute of limitation” in hearing the case.

“Seeking justice for murder is a legal right of everyone,” he said, opposing the limitation to hearing the time-barred cases.

“Murder is murder no matter how many years have passed,” he said.

Previously, an 11-member larger bench of the apex court, headed by former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had conducted five hearings on the case, including the last in January 2012.