Benazir was always loyal to her friends, open minded and secular. We were friendly for more than 30 years. She fascinated me from the first day I met her as a fellow student at Oxford. She was campaigning for the university to award her father an honorary degree and at that time I led the student opposition disgusted by what we saw as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ignoble role in persecuting Sheikh Mujib and his followers.

As associations go, ours started off on the wrong foot with a shouting match outside Wadham College, Oxford. The issue was this honorary degree that she was so determined to secure for her father. For the best part of six months after that exchange there was silence and mutual hostility. Then out of the blue came an invitation to a drinks party hosted jointly by Benazir and Peter Galbraith, another fellow student and the son of the former US ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.

“So you have stopped speaking to me?” Benazir inquired when I showed up for the reception to help launch her career in Oxford student politics. “Pinky” (her pet name), I replied in Urdu. “Who am I to ignore a Shahzadi?” We remained on friendly terms from then onwards.

A few years later, after her father was hanged and Benazir herself was placed under house arrest and later exiled, I interviewed Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia-ul Haq several times for the London Observer. At the first interview and all subsequent interviews, I always asked when he was going to let Benazir return home to Pakistan.

At our last interview Zia told me, “Mr Bhatia, your wish has finally been granted, Benazir is being allowed to return home.” When I asked him why, he replied, “Democracy is a bitter pill we must swallow.” Someone must have repeated this conversation to Benazir as evidence of my loyalty to her. When she did fly back to Lahore in 1986, she arranged for me to ride with her in the lead lorry that took us to the Minar-e-Pakistan where she addressed a million strong rally, asking the adoring crowd, “Zia avey avey, ya Zia javey, javey?” (should Zia come or should Zia go ?) The crowd roared back, “Javey, javey.”

Months later Zia was killed in a plane crash and Benazir became prime minister. During that time we had no contact, although I did bump into her brother, Murtaza, in Damascus who told me with some bitterness in an interview for The Observer that he as the male heir of his father should be prime minister and not Benazir.

When the interview with Murtaza was published I received a writ from Benazir’s mother, Nusrat, saying l was trying to defame her family. Fortunately, the interview had been recorded and so the writ was dropped. When some years later I asked Benazir why her mother had reacted so badly, she replied it was because Murtaza was Nusrat’s favourite child.

After she was deposed, Benazir took up residence with her family in Dubai. She would travel to London regularly, which is where I would see her at least once a year, occasionally for a cup of tea and at other times for lunch.

Our most memorable encounter was in Dubai in 2003 where I stopped on my way back to London from Delhi. Benazir and her three children sat around me for the meal. Nusrat Bhutto was upstairs attended by nurses. After dinner we talked and talked for hours. We laughed about our Oxford days, Benazir told me how much she had loved her father and her love for Pakistan. We also talked about the Shimla summit with Benazir telling me in particular about how unsettling she found it with Mrs Gandhi’s eyes following her around the room wherever she went.

The most extraordinary part of our conversation, which I promised never to reveal in her life time, was Benazir’s role in exporting her country’s nuclear secrets to North Korea. She had participated in the negotiations to give Pakistan’s nuclear bomb details to North Korea in exchange for missile technology from Pyongyang.

The issue, as she explained it, was to somehow convey the relevant nuclear data to North Korea without the Americans finding out. The solution in which she connived was to find an overcoat with the deepest pockets possible in which she could carry warhead designs on a series of CDs during a state visit to Pyongyang. The grateful North Koreans immediately responded by giving Pakistan the missile technology they so urgently needed in return. And nobody guessed. Indeed everyone to this day has wondered how it was possible for the information to be relayed.

I remember as if it was yesterday. Benazir telling me with such sorrow that she was convinced that General Zia had personally ordered the murder of her younger brother, Shahnawaz, and that elements of the Pakistan military were behind the death of her other brother, Murtaza.

As for herself, Benazir said, her grass roots popularity had been a thorn in the side of Zia and all his successors. “Therefore for a series of people I must be eliminated. The first successor (Zia) tried to eliminate me, to impose a one party rule in the country. Now the military again wants to eliminate me because they want the MMA — the alliance of religious parties — to be the only alternative in the country.”

Shyam Bhatia, editor of Asian Affairs, is based in London