Benazir Bhutto was the Pakistan People's Party's "chairperson for life," and her assassination leaves a vacuum in the leadership of the country's largest party. One possible successor, reports the Globe and Mail, is her 19-year-old son Bilawal, who, with his family, attended his mother's burial today. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, refused to speculate on the leadership, saying, "All I can say is we're devastated."
Bilawal Bhutto is a student at Oxford, his mother's alma mater, and the eldest of her three children; she was said to have been grooming him to carry on the family's legacy. More immediately, reports the Hindu, Zardari could become provisional leader, as could two other prominent politicians: Makhdoom Amin Fahim, a loyal Bhutto aide, and Aitzaz Ahsan, a top lawyer detained for protests during the state of emergency. (More Benazir Bhutto stories.)