Benazir to allow US strike on Bin Laden

Islamabad: The exiled former prime minister and chairperson of Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Benazir Bhutto said yesterday that she might allow a US military strike inside Pakistan to eliminate Osama Bin Laden if she were the country's leader.

"I would hope that I would be able to take Bin Laden myself without depending on the US support. But if I couldn't do it, of course we are fighting this war on terror together and I would seek their help in eliminating him," Bhutto said in an interview with BBC before leaving New York for the UK.

Bhutto arrived in London where she will chair the high-level crucial two- day meeting of the PPP Central Executive Committee and the Federal Council which will devise strategy regarding presidential elections on October 6 and Bhutto's return to the country on October 18.

Rejected

The government of President Pervez Musharraf has, several times categorically rejected this notion of allowing US and Allied forces to strike anywhere on Pakistani soil in the war on terror.

The government's top functionaries including Musharraf himself has said that if the US government has credible information on Bin Laden or his top aides' presence on Pakistani soil, they should share this information and Pakistani forces are quite capable of take on Al Qaida leadership.

"I think one really needs to see the information regarding Bin Laden's presence on our soil," she said.

"But if there was evidence, my first reference would be to go in myself and if ... there was a difficulty on that I'd like to cooperate with the Americans".

- Benazir Bhutto was born on June 21, 1953, into a wealthy landowning family. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and was president and later prime minister of Pakistan from 1971 to 1977.

--After gaining degrees in politics at Harvard and Oxford universities, she returned to Pakistan in 1977, just before the military seized power from her father. She inherited the leadership of the PPP after her father's execution in 1979 under the military ruler General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.

- First voted in as prime minister in 1988, Bhutto was sacked by the then-president on corruption charges in 1990. She took power again in 1993 after her successor, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign in a row with the president. Bhutto was no more successful in her second spell as prime minister, and Sharif was back in power by 1996.

- In 1999, both Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were sentenced to five years in jail and fined $8.6 million on charges of taking kickbacks from a Swiss company hired to fight customs fraud. A higher court later overturned the conviction as biased. Bhutto, who had made her husband investment minister during her period in office from 1993 to 1996, was abroad at the time of her conviction and chose not to return to Pakistan. Pakistan decided to drop corruption cases against the former prime minister yesterday.

- In 2006 she joined an Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy with her arch rival Sharif, but the two disagreed over strategy for dealing with Musharraf. Bhutto decided it was better to negotiate with Musharraf, while Sharif has refused to have any dealings with the general.

--An aide to the former prime minister announced in September that she will return to Pakistan on October 18, after more than eight years in exile.