Bhutto's children leave Pakistan for Dubai

Tue Jan 1, 2008 8:27am EST
 
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KARACHI (Reuters) - The children of slain Pakistan leader Benazir Bhutto left for Dubai on Tuesday, days after their mother was killed in a gun-and-bomb attack, an airport official said.

Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, appointed chairman of her Pakistan People's Party on Sunday after her murder in Rawalpindi last Thursday, left for Dubai on an Emirates flight with his sisters Bakhtawar, 17, and Aseefa, 14.

"The three reached Karachi on a domestic flight from Sukkur this afternoon and then boarded the Emirates flight for Dubai," an airport official told Reuters.

Sukkur, a town in the interior of the southern province of Sindh, has the closest airport to the Bhutto ancestral home in Larkana district, where Bhutto was buried on Friday.

Bilawal, a student at Britain's Oxford University, where his mother also studied, told a news conference on Sunday he would complete his studies before returning to lead the party.

His father and Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, was made co-chairman of the party and will lead it until Bilawal is ready to take over.

Candidates for parliament in Pakistan must be at least 25.

(Reporting by Faisal Aziz; Editing by Robert Birsel and Jerry Norton)

 
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