Hours before she was assassinated, former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto spoke to her three children over phone.

Though she was busy with her election campaign in Punjab province throughout Thursday morning, she took out time to speak to her children Bakhtawar (19), Bilawal (17) and Asifa (14).

“There were meetings going on but she spoke to her children as she normally did whenever she was away from home,” a close aide of Bhutto told The Post. Bhutto spoke at length to her youngest daughter Asifa, the aide said.

Bhutto had taken a three-day break from her election campaign in early December to meet her family in Dubai. Though she was to fly to Dubai on December 6, the trip was delayed by a day because of a mix-up over her passport, and that was her last meeting with her children. Fearing there would be more attempts on her life, Zardari had then asked Bhutto not to go back to Pakistan, especially in view of the suicide attacks on her homecoming rally in Karachi on October 18 that killed nearly 140 people.

“She knew that something like this could happen and she told her husband that she is not afraid,” Bhutto’s aide recalled.

When he received the news, an inconsolable Zardari initially refused to believe that Bhutto had died. “I don’t believe all this. I will believe it only when I see her with my own eyes,” he sobbed.

Bhutto married Zardari in 1987 and was very proud of her family. “I am lucky to have a good husband and good children,” she told a TV channel recently.

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