Benazir Bhutto's supporters mark her 55th birthday

Islamabad: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leaders, ministers, legislators and workers donated blood for the needy throughout the country on Saturday in homage to slain leader Benazir Bhutto on the occasion of her 55th birth anniversary.

The party organised special ceremonies where people recited Quranic verses and offered prayers for the leader, who was assassinated on December 27 last year in a gun and bomb attack in Rawalpindi near Islamabad.

Bhutto's widower and political successor Asif Ali Zardari mournfully commemorated the birthday in the family's ancestral town of Garhi Khuda Baksh in Sindh, where thousands of supporters joined the ceremony.

Blood donations

Zardari, who made a blood donation along with others, paid tributes to Benazir Bhutto and vowed that the party would accomplish her mission. Earlier he placed 55 bouquets at her grave.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, National Assembly speaker Fehmida Mirza and PPP ministers and parliamentarians donated blood in Islamabad.

Gilani also visited the hospital in Rawalpindi where Benazir Bhutto passed away as well as the site where she had come under the deadly attack at Liaquat garden after an election rally.

The prime minister has named the capital's airport, a main road and the hospital after Benazir Bhutto and the government has announced special remissions in jail sentences of prisoners. A monument for Benazir will also be built at the site of her assassination.

As reported by Associated Press, Gilani called for his country's thousands of death sentences to be commuted to life in prison as part of a birthday tribute to Bhutto.

Though Gilani does not have the authority to directly commute the sentences, he said he would forward a recommendation to empty death row to President Pervez Musharraf, who is expected to approve it.

The mass commutation, which would not prevent future death sentences from being handed down, would be a major victory for human rights activists.

Earlier this week, New York-based Human Rights Watch said about 7,000 people - nearly one quarter of all prisoners in Pakistan - are awaiting execution on the country's death row, among the world's largest. In 2007, 309 prisoners were sentenced to death and 134 were hanged, the group said.

Mahmoodul Hassan, an official at Adyala Jail near Rawalpindi - where Gilani was repeatedly imprisoned throughout his political career - said the death row prisoners rejoiced after hearing the prime minister's speech on TV.

Gilani also recommended that prisoners, except those guilty of the worst crimes, have their sentences reduced by three months.