Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Bhutto’s son, a student at Oxford University who has not lived in his native land since he was 10, changed his name to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari at the weekend as he was named symbolic leader of Pakistan’s largest opposition political party, extending his family’s dynasty but leaving major questions over its role in the fight for democracy in the crisis-plagued state.

Bilawal Zardari is six years shy of the age at which Pakistanis may become members of parliament, but that did not stop party elders appointing him to the top job in the PPP.

He will play only a ceremonial role until he graduates from university, leaving his controversial father, Asif Ali Zardari, to run the party in the interim.

Critics said the decision to keep power in the hands of Bhutto’s family missed an opportunity for the party that says it represents the will of the common people to introduce democracy into its ownsystem.

In her last political will and testament read to party leaders by her son, Bhutto indicated she wanted her husband to take over leadership of the party.

After PPP officials accepted the transition, Mr Zardari immediately appointed his teenage son to the post, preferring to serve as co-chairman.

Senior PPP supporters yesterday expressed dismay over the appointments, one telling The Australian: "Even in the context of our feudal traditions, it looks silly. What on earth can a 19-year-old kid who can’t even be elected to parliament bring to the party, apart from the name Bhutto?"

Commentators in the press wondered what relevance a teenager in fashionable Armani glasses who has not lived in Pakistan since he was a boy had to a mass-based, popular political party. According to Mahnaz Malik, a friend writing yesterday in The Times, Bilawal was a collector of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books, driving around London with his two sisters to buy them.

"I remember him as a shy, bespectacled teenager, often looking after his sisters. He was a film buff and I would struggle to choose a film that he had not seen when we all went to the cinema," Mr Malik wrote.

"Bibi (Benazir) was keen on reading and bought books by the boxful. But she was broadminded enough to realise that teenage tastes can vary. I remember one summer we spent the entire afternoon at a comic book shop near Russell Square as Bilawal, with his sisters, completed their collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel comic books."

Bilawal Bhutto was calm but clearly uneasy when he appeared at a press briefing after the meeting of the central executive committee that appointed him to the top post. He spoke very briefly and only in English, leading to speculation he was not at ease with the national Urdu language.

Mr Zardari intervened when reporters tried to question his son, citing his tender age and sensitivity to deflect anything directed at the heir to the Bhutto legacy.

Mr Zardari yesterday won praise for the way he has conducted himself since arriving back in Pakistan following his wife’s assassination.

The influential The News newspaper said in an editorial "his image of the past notwithstanding, the role and perception about Mr Zardari has undergone a sea-change in recent years".

New details emerged yesterday of how doctors who treated Bhutto were pressured to conform with the Government’s account of how she died.

Lawyer Athar Minallah, son-in-law of a former Supreme Court judge and board member of the Rawalpindi General Hospital, released a medical report together with an open letter that showed doctors trying to distance themselves from official claims she died as a result of injuries sustained when she bumped her head on the 4WD she was travelling in, rather than from bullet wounds.

Mr Minallah claimed the doctor who wrote the medical report issued by the Government had, on the night of the shooting, told him that Bhutto died of bullet wounds.

The medical report, co-signed by six other doctors, made no mention of gunshot wounds.

Mr Minallah said doctors had told him that without a proper autopsy, "it is not at all possible to determine as to what caused the injury".

Mr Minallah’s statement added support to demands for an inquiry into how Bhutto died and why the Government changed its stance from initially claiming there were bullet wounds to saying she died from a bump on the head. PPP supporters believe there was official complicity in her death and that she was killed by the Pakistani intelligence agencies.

Mr Zardari again yesterday ruled out allowing exhumation of his wife’s body. But President Pervez Musharraf, in a conversation with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, conceded for the first time that he might consider allowing international investigators to look into the case.

Mr Zardari, who declined the original request for an autopsy, said the PPP would press the UN Security Council for an investigation similar to that carried out into the assassination of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri after he was killed two years ago.