Benazir's daughter wants to step into her shoes

Slain former premier Benazir Bhutto's daughter Bakhtawar has said she wants to serve the people of Pakistan like her mother but was not sure if she wanted to join politics.

Seventeen-year-old Bakhtawar, who is at school in Dubai, said those who killed her mother feared her mission. She pledged to continue the mission of her mother, who was assassinated in December last year.

Bakhtawar exhorted Pakistani women to do whatever they wanted in their lives. She said she hoped to see the same sort of gender equality across Pakistan as she saw in her own home.

Education was one of Benazir's missions and she would continue that, Bakhtawar told Dubai-based ARY television channel in an interview.

She said she had not yet made up her mind about entering politics because she is concentrating on her studies.

Bakhtawar is keen on becoming a rap singer and Benazir encouraged her to take up singing as a career. She even asked a journalist friend in the US to introduce Bakhtawar to Puff Daddy.

Bakhtawar and her younger sister Asifa have lived in Dubai for the past few years. Benazir wrote about her two daughters in her last book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy

and the West, saying that her husband Asif Ali Zardari was to stay behind in Dubai with them after she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in October last year.

"Asif and I had made a very calculated, difficult decision. We understood the dangers and the risks of my return, and we wanted to make sure that no matter what happened, our daughters and our son, Bilawal (at college at Oxford), would have a parent to take care of them," she wrote in the book that was released after her death.

"It was a discussion that few husbands and wives ever have to have, thankfully... The people of Pakistan will always come first. My children understood it (the decision) and not only accepted it but encouraged me," she wrote.