FACTBOX-Teenager cast as new hero in epic Bhutto tragedy

Dec 30 (Reuters) - The 19-year-old son of slain Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is now heir to the country's most powerful political dynasty.

University student Bilawal Zardari, Bhutto's only son and eldest child, stepped forward to receive the family's inheritance on Sunday, accepting joint leadership of her party along with his father, Asif Ali Zardari.

Here are some facts about Bilawal Zardari:

* Bilawal is six years short of the eligible age to stand for parliament and is more familiar with the high streets of Dubai and London, his family homes during Benazir Bhutto's long years of exile, than with Pakistan's troubled electorates.

* He went to a prestigious high school in Dubai and recently followed his mother's footsteps to Oxford, but his mother's constant political travails and his father's jailing for eight years on "cooked up" graft charges left a deep imprint on him.

* In the violent tradition of South Asia's major political dynasties, where leadership can end in a pool of blood, Bilawal finds himself called to centre stage of an epic tragedy.

* Almost 30 years before his mother was assassinated in a gun-and-bomb attack, his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister, was hanged by the military regime that had deposed him.

* In his few press interviews, an adolescent Bilawal revealed a political conscience and a burning sense of injustice at the way his mother and father had been treated by Pakistan's military and by her chief political rival, Nawaz Sharif.

* As a 16-year-old at high school, he told the Press Trust of India in an interview in 2004 that he felt justice and democracy held the key to resolving Pakistan's problems.

* Asked if he would one day enter the whirlpool of Pakistani politics, Bilawal, a Taekwondo black-belt and horse-riding enthusiast like his father, was quoted as saying:

"We will see, I don't know. I would like to help the people of Pakistan, so I will decide when I finish my studies." He added: "I can either enter politics, or I can enter another career that would benefit the people.". (Reporting by Mark Bendeich, Simon Gardner and Augustine Anthony, editing by Peter Millership)