These children were stolen from their families as part of the Australian government’s plan to wipe out the entire Aboriginal race, to breed them white. The genocide ended as recently as 1970. The fight for justice has only just begun. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report.

The storm drove gullies into the red soil and drenched the Aboriginal mothers on the hill. They had gathered to bless the remains of 400 babies snatched at birth or shortly after, in the name of God and assimilation. All had died in the same children’s home located just a few miles away.

A single monument marked the grave site, carved from bluestone, the rock used to build the home’s 12ft walls, a towering perimeter that had kept the natural mothers out, and their children out of sight. The memorial was draped with the branches of a ghost gum tree, which the mourners set alight. The smoke would guide the spirits of the stolen children home.

The stone had been erected at the edge of a pioneers’ cemetery called Will Rook, where, more than a century before, Angus McDonald, a settler from Inverness, had stood grieving before the inscribed headstone of his daughter, Catherine. The Aboriginal monument placed beside it, bore no names or dedications. It was laid as a testament to two generations of infants whose bodies were secretly dumped. The plaque noted simply that beneath it lay the children who died after being taken from their families and placed in the care of St Joseph’s Babies Home, Broadmeadows, Victoria.

The burial ceremony, in August last year, followed a shocking discovery in the basement of a Melbourne house. Files dating from 1901 to 1942 recorded the deaths of 402 infants in the care of the Catholic Sisters of St Joseph. They showed that almost half were of Aboriginal descent and had been forcibly taken from their mothers and held until the nuns could arrange fostering or adoption with white families. None lived long enough to be placed. There was no indication of why or how so many children died, or why their bodies were secretly buried. The files came to light only because adopted Aborigines, searching for their relations, began contacting homes such as St Joseph’s. The results shamed Australia.

Larry Walsh, 44, an Aborigine who was taken from his mother at the age of three, represents the fifth generation in his family to be taken, and believes that some of his relatives are buried in Will Rook Cemetery. “Nobody knew they were here. The parents of these dead children never spoke about them after they were taken away. They were too ashamed – ashamed that a white person had taken away their child; ashamed they had done nothing to stop it; ashamed of their colour; ashamed to admit defeat.”

The removal of Aboriginal babies and babies from the northerly Torres Strait Islands, from their families by social workers and missionaries seeking to “save” them from squalor was brought to public attention three years ago, when 600 adopted Aboriginal men and women revealed how they had been taken from their parents by force. Some described how they were brought up as white, others how they stayed in the children’s homes, too dark-skinned to be wanted. “There was a sudden realisation that we had no history, nothing to pass down to our kids,” said Barbara Cummings, a social worker and Aboriginal activist. All are seeking compensation.

A national inquiry reported in May this year that between 1910 and 1970 as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children had been taken from their parents and either put in care or adopted by white families. Hundreds had been sexually abused. Many later committed suicide. There followed a period of national soul-searching. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote of a “dark stain on Australian history, which ranks with some of the 20th century’s most unforgivable systematic violations of human rights”.

Worse was to come. A second church in Victoria announced that it, too, had used a secret graveyard to bury Aboriginal children. Medical papers showed that black babies and toddlers had been used as guinea pigs: dosed with antidepressants, injected with experimental whooping cough and herpes vaccines. Aboriginal women told of being sterilised without their consent, and having their babies taken from them before they could even hold them.

Others told of children being snatched while their parents were at work; how mothers were falsely told their children had died; how adopted children were told their real mothers were whores and drunks; how the government of Australia had planned to breed out the blackness and create an assimilated race only of whites.

<b>For more of this story please contact us.</b>

On November 4 last year, Neil Heywood jumped into his new silver Jaguar and left his home in a £4,000-a-month gated community in the north of Beijing to head to a meeting in the city centre.

The 41-year-old Old Harrovian had prepared as he always did for his meetings. He was wearing a cream linen suit, which spoke to his credentials as an Englishman abroad, an Aston Martin tiepin on the right lapel and a signet ring on his left little finger. In China, where he had lived for 15 years, this particular affectation spoke loudly of a gentleman, or hinted at blue-blooded credentials, opening even firmly closed doors.

That day, however, he was seeing a fellow Briton, an influential member of the House of Lords who was a regular visitor. They would meet at the eye-wateringly expensive China World hotel, where a cup of tea costs £15. The deal was that Heywood would foot the bill, so long as the peer gave him 30 good minutes.

Heywood had several new money-making projects he wanted to talk through: matching hard-up British companies to cut-price Chinese manufacturers. A few carefully managed relationships, using tip-offs provided by the contact, could earn him a lucrative finder’s fee — up to 15% of contracts worth millions of pounds.

However, the peer was annoyed by how Heywood would crudely fish for influence and contacts every time they met. Heywood was also always late and, in recent years, had failed to convert most of the connections advanced him into hard cash. He had become an irritant.

There was one reason why the visitor persisted with Heywood, as did many others. Heywood ruthlessly marketed his links to one of China’s most important political families, headed by Bo Xilai, a rising star who commentators believed would become China’s vice-president when the Communist party changed its leadership at the end of 2012.

As well as talking business that afternoon, the pair discussed a story that The Wall Street Journal was investigating. It concerned Bo’s son, Guagua, who, it had been rumoured, was indulging in frequent champagne parties, endless beautiful girls and fast cars while living abroad. The story could be very damaging to his father, whose political success was based on rooting out corruption and standing up for the man in the street.

Unsolicited, Heywood had begun to intervene, calling up contacts, seeing if he could get the story kiboshed. “I’m having to kill that [Guagua] story,” he told his guest.

Within 10 days it was Heywood who was dead. His body was found in a hotel room in the megacity of Chongqing, where Bo was party chief. His death has been a mystery ever since. The Chinese authorities initially attributed it to alcohol poisoning, but struggled to explain why his body had been hastily cremated before any forensic tests could take place.

Attention soon turned to Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, amid rumours that she had conducted an affair with Heywood. Three months ago she was convicted of his murder, the prosecution claiming she had laced his drink with cyanide.

Her trial lasted just one day, however, strengthening suspicions that she was convicted as part of a Communist party power struggle rather than as the result of any credible investigation into Heywood’s death. Her husband was subsequently stripped of all his powers and expelled from the party.

The scandal hit the Chinese Communist party during the top-level but secretive infighting before the current change of leadership in Beijing.

Until now, Heywood himself has remained an enigma, with few sources prepared to speak about him. Reports in the wake of his death suggested he was an influential deal-maker who had contacts at the heart of the Chinese regime. His 007 numberplate — even his mobile phone number ended with the same digits — fuelled fanciful stories that he had been an agent of British intelligence.

After an exhaustive investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches, based on numerous conversations with friends, business colleagues, diplomatic sources and a Chinese contact who knew both Heywood and the Bo family intimately, we can reveal the real Neil Heywood.

Far from being a top-level fixer or spy, he was a failed businessman who found himself caught up in a situation he could not control. He then made a fatal miscalculation that led to his murder.

Heywood was born into a comfortable upbringing. Peter, his father, was a stockbroker and his mother, Ann, worked in telesales. He had a younger sister, Leonie, and the family lived in a double-fronted Victorian villa in Battersea, south London.

From birth, Heywood’s name was down for Harrow, the north London public school his father and grandfather had attended. He took up his place in January 1984, aged 13, sporting bouffant black hair.

As he settled in to school life his housemaster, David Parry, spotted that Heywood was a shirker. “He believed in the idea that Harrow would in due course open the requisite doors in life,” said Parry. “There was something about him which is missing, I don’t know what but there’s something which was indefinable.”

Heywood’s laziness caught up with him when he sat his O-levels. After a “mediocre” show, Parry warned the boy that he was unlikely to get into university. The teacher says now: “If you want to get on in life you’ve actually got to work, and if you don’t work you won’t get the rewards, so I’m never sure about Neil on that aspect. There was always an easy way.”

Heywood scraped through his A-levels, with two Bs and a C, disappointing grades for Harrow but enough to get him into Warwick University where he read politics and international studies.

Although he would depend on his Harrow connections for the rest of his life, he left school without ever turning back.

“I never heard a word from him,” said Parry, who was accustomed to attending former pupils’ weddings and significant birthdays. “Nothing at all, he just went. It’s a bit sad, really.”

At Warwick, Heywood left even fewer traces. Then, after graduating in 1992, he sought his fortune on the other side of the world, winning a small bursary to study Chinese in Beijing. What he did next is unclear but in 1995, after completing his course, he travelled even further away, to China’s northeast and the provincial port city of Dalian, a place that few outside China had heard of.

Dalian was undergoing massive changes. Its influential and well-connected mayor was Bo Xilai, who was intent on transforming it into “the Hong Kong of the north”. He began encouraging western companies to invest in his city, with hundreds of factories opening as the port was modernised.

Dalian’s new middle classes sought to enrol their children at one of the city’s private schools, wanting to learn English. Heywood had no trouble finding himself a job teaching English at Dalian Experimental Primary School in the central Xicheng district.

By the end of the 1990s, he had put down roots. He was dating a local girl, Wang Lulu, with whom he would have two children. He told colleagues he wanted to open his own language school but nothing came of his plans.

When he went to Beijing to register his marriage in 2000, he attracted the attention of the British embassy. Diplomats were always on the lookout for sounding boards in a hard-to-read country. Kerry Brown, first secretary, was intrigued.

“At that time there weren’t a huge number of British business people based outside Beijing,” Brown said. “Neil Heywood seemed a pretty positive character, very British.” However, when Brown visited Heywood in Dalian months later and found him wandering about in jeans and a jumper, he wondered about his business acumen: “He seemed to just be drifting by.”

Was the embassy’s interest in Heywood at the root of suggestions that he was working for MI6? Our investigations have found no evidence that he was a paid agent of British intelligence. The government has strongly denied that he was an agent or that it had paid him. (MI6 would hardly encourage its assets to drive around with a 007 numberplate.)

However, it would not be surprising if, like their diplomatic colleagues, British intelligence officers made use of Heywood to give them information about a remote region of China.

By 2001, Heywood was short of money. Teaching paid badly and was hard work. He decided to branch into the lucrative consultancy business that many of his expat friends practised.

Unlike them, Heywood had learnt Chinese and he had a local wife. Now what he needed was guanxi, or connections. After reading in a newspaper that Bo Xilai’s son had gone to England and was studying at Harrow, Heywood spotted an opening.

Through a resourceful British contact, and using his Harrow connections, he sought an introduction to Guagua and his mother, who was then living in a flat in west London to be close to her son.

Heywood told friends he got the boy into Harrow — a claim that has been reported as fact since his death. It is incorrect. Guagua was already at the school by the time Heywood came on the scene. In fact, he met Guagua and his mother in 2002 at a Chinese restaurant: the Royal China, in Baker Street, London.

The inside story of the scandal comes from a close friend of the key players. This Chinese source, who was a first-hand witness to many of the events in the saga, has provided testimony that challenges almost everything written about it. Many of the source’s assertions have now been backed up by third parties.

“Heywood sought to introduce himself through mutual friends,” the source said. “The interest was that he was a Harrovian who has been living in Dalian, where Guagua was born.”

There was nothing more to it than that. “It was just a friendly introduction,” the source said, “unrelated to any school matters or business.”

Neil Heywood, a 41 year old Harrovian (Reuters) Guagua and his mother had arrived in Britain in December 1999 so he could attend a crash course in English at a language school in Bournemouth.

To get Guagua into Harrow in 2000, the family had approached Fido Vivien-May, a Royal British Legion volunteer who was known by the language school. He confirmed that he had helped Guagua with his application, but that the “boy had got in on merit alone”.

By 2002, with Guagua settled at school, his mother was ready to go home to be with her husband, who was rising up the party ranks. So when Heywood later suggested that he could act as a guardian for Guagua, picking him up from Harrow during half-terms, Gu Kailai readily agreed. She even gave Heywood a second-hand Mercedes to ferry her son about and suggested he could use the family’s flat in Coleherne Court, a mansion block in west London where Diana, Princess of Wales, had lived before marrying Prince Charles.

Heywood and Guagua had Harrow and Dalian in common. But, according to the source, the relationship between them was limited: “Neil would occasionally help with mundane matters related to a student’s life. But he was not in any way employed by the Bo family nor was he ever obliged to run errands for them.”

No money changed hands, but as far as Heywood was concerned, he had, at last, guanxi. In 2002, he stated in his entry to the Harrow Register, which documents old boys’ interests, that he was a “facilitator for English companies in China”.

He had already established a company, Neil Heywood & Associates, from his mother’s address in Streatham, south London. According to company reports, the firm was dormant. Several times, it was gazetted for failing to present accounts. Our Chinese source said Heywood “showed little interest in doing real work”.

Outwardly, Heywood acted as if he had found gold. When Bo was promoted to national commerce minister in 2004, Heywood and his family followed him to Beijing, where Heywood put his children into the exclusive Dulwich College international school. He joined the British Chamber of Commerce and attended British embassy events.

Kerry Brown, no longer first secretary but working for the Chatham House think tank, noticed a dramatic change in Heywood’s behaviour. Decked out in a linen suit, brogues and smart tie, he was more aloof.

“He was perfectly pleasant, perfectly affable,” Brown recalls, “but he would have probably been calculating as he was talking to me, ‘Well, this guy, he’s OK, he’s all right but time is money’. When the Bo name inevitably came up, Heywood claimed to know the family well.”

Brown remained sceptical of Heywood and his new job. “Consultants in China live off connections, and many people claim intimacy or closeness to big leaders which isn’t that real. It’s a bit of a smoke-and-mirror environment.”

Another who met Heywood around this time was Bob Shead, the British trade consul in Shanghai. “Heywood was on the grey side of the business community,” he recalled. “He pitched himself as somebody who could get things done.”

When Shead met Heywood at a British embassy event, he was handing out business cards for Aston Martin Beijing.

“He was basically the western face to put before potential clients who like the idea of somebody from a public school background who spoke in an upper-class tone.”

Heywood also presented Shead with business cards stating he was chief China representative for Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, a relative of Sir Winston Churchill, who was looking to launch her interior decoration business into China. Spencer-Churchill confirmed that she and Heywood had attempted to work together but said it had come to nothing.

In 2007, things started to go badly for Heywood. Bo Xilai’s powerful father, who had been a close associate of Chairman Mao, died, leaving Bo vulnerable to political enemies. Within a few months, he was sent to distant Chongqing, a huge city to the southwest, to become party secretary.

Bo used his exile to stage a political comeback, launching a campaign that targeted corruption and revived Maoist slogans. Though it was popular with ordinary people, it brought him many enemies among local businessmen who accused Bo of seizing their companies to hand over to his cronies.

The campaign, and Bo’s image, also antagonised some among the party leadership in Beijing. They favoured gentle reforms that would usher in market forces, rather than Bo’s populist strongman approach. He was losing friends quickly.

In December 2007, an extraordinary crisis hit the family, according to our source. Gu Kailai, who had appeared at her father-in-law’s funeral looking emaciated, was found to have been poisoned with mercury.

Guagua, studying at Oxford, asked to take a year off to be with her. The source said: “Top doctors visited Gu’s home every day and she barely went out to any official events. She also ceased most of her contacts with her former friends and acquaintances. She didn’t even have a phone.”

Cut off from his main contact in the family, Heywood’s business, such as it was, nosedived. He tried to bluff his way through, telling an acquaintance he had been on the plane with Bo during his inaugural flight to Chongqing.

“There is no way that a remote family friend such as Neil, a foreigner, would have accompanied a Chinese leader,” the source recalled. “Bo Xilai barely knew Neil and they have actually never engaged in a [single] proper conversation.”

Nevertheless, Gu agreed to help Heywood out of his financial struggle, in acknowledgment of the years he had looked after Guagua. In late 2007, she introduced Heywood to a property developer who wanted to build a vast estate of English-style houses outside Chongqing. “It was purely a gesture of friendship,” the source said. “She was never a participant in that project, nor a beneficiary.”

Everything Heywood touched seemed doomed. By 2008, he had been shut out of the development for failing to bring the British investment he had promised. That summer, when the bill arrived for his children’s school fees, a distraught Heywood sent an email to Guagua, asking that Gu “compensate him in cash for the failed project and for his years looking after Guagua”, according to the source. He asked for “tens of millions of pounds”.

The family was staggered. “It was absurd to ask for an extraordinary amount for merely having run the most convenient of errands, and even more extraordinary to ask Gu Kailai for compensation for the exclusion from a project,” the source said.

Sensing a growing crisis, Guagua sought to get his mother and Heywood together at a teahouse near Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Olympics of 2008. Heywood backed down. He apologised to everyone. “Neil suggested that he didn’t really mean all the sum he asked and he was just seeing if they could lend him a hand,” the source says.

In April 2010, Heywood returned to Britain, after his firm had been temporarily struck off the companies register for failing to post its accounts. He was forced to pay for an expensive High Court appeal to get the judgment suspended so he could settle his debts without incurring a credit blacklisting.

His debts mounting, in early 2011 Heywood emailed Guagua, again demanding money. This message was far more aggressive than the first. It was to prove a fatal mistake. Guagua, according to the source, told his mother about the emails in the presence of the Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, who had investigated Gu’s poisoning and become close to her.

A few days after the Heywood conversation, Wang asked to see Guagua to talk about security. The source said Wang was determined to persuade the Bo family that Heywood was a dangerous character.

“When Guagua voiced scepticism that Neil could have been a threat, he [Wang] would reply something like, ‘You don’t know their tactics’ or ‘The people who seem the most innocent can be the most dangerous’.”

Gu filed a police report about Heywood’s behaviour at Wang’s behest. To anyone who had access to that report, there was evidence that he was a foreigner who could do the Bo family harm — or be used to do so. For her it served to contain Heywood. But others would use it against her as the perfect motive for murder, according to the source.

The last person to have a substantial conversation with Heywood was Tom Reed, a British financial journalist who met him for dinner at “an ersatz Italian place up in Shunyi” four days before he died.

Heywood seemed happier than he had been for months, Reed said. He talked about his new work for Hakluyt, the private intelligence consultancy, and plans to move back to Britain. He did not mention the Bo family.

Two days later, on November 11, Heywood was at the launch party of the Sports Car Club in Beijing’s Workers Stadium. Some of the richest young men in China were there. The next morning he received a call to go to Chongqing.

At that point, all certainty ends. The reporting of the case in China has been tempered by leaks and counter-leaks, some pointing to the Bo family’s complicity, others to a plot to frame them by their enemies.

Despite the conviction of Gu and her household aide, Zhang Xiaojun, for his murder, it is still not clear even who called Heywood to Chongqing. The family insider claims, unsurprisingly, that it is unlikely to have been Gu, claiming that “she didn’t even have his number” and that after the poisoning she had become a broken recluse.

What happened after Heywood arrived in room 1605 of the secluded Lucky Holiday hotel is even murkier. Serious inconsistences in the trial have led senior pathologists in China to speak out, saying no credible scientific evidence was presented in the case to convict Gu.

While Gu’s defence team did not deny she had been to see Heywood at the hotel, the court also heard claims that she left him unharmed and that his body was moved after death. A muddy footprint on the windowsill also attested to some kind of foul play, it was alleged. The victim was cremated before a post-mortem examination could be carried out, removing all reliable forensic evidence.

The source believes that Gu was framed for killing Heywood to undermine her husband’s political career just as he was on the brink of becoming vice-president of China.

“I find it impossible to believe Gu Kailai would willingly murder Neil, unless she was not herself for some reason . . . She just doesn’t have a trace of violence in her,” the source concluded. Why would Gu, a lawyer, report him to the police and then kill him?

The truth is unlikely to emerge. Many of the known principals in the case are now in the custody of the Chinese state. Gu is serving a life sentence; Bo is under investigation for his alleged part in the murder; Wang is also in jail after attempting to defect to the United States by seeking sanctuary in its embassy in Chengdu. Guagua, who had been studying at Harvard, is in hiding and out of contact with his parents.

All that is certain is that Neil Heywood, an idle, well-meaning chancer, fell into a trap, partially of his own making, and that his death triggered the biggest scandal to hit China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

As the Chinese Communist party holds its 18th National Congress — a once-in-a-decade meeting to rubber-stamp a change of leadership decided behind closed doors — the file on Heywood’s murder has been consigned to the archives. It would take almost unimaginable political reform for it to be taken out again and the explosive truth revealed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-viewing–the-dark-charisma-of-adolf-hitler-bbc2-dispatches-chinese-murder-mystery-channel-4-8307201.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/12/dispatches-chinese-murder-mystery-review#start-of-comments

Metropolitan police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe shows up at the US embassy in London in a right old state. His boss, London mayor Boris Johnson, is going to kill him, he says, and he’d like to defect to the US please. The reason Boris is going to kill him is that Bernard knows that Boris’s wife – with whom Bernard became friendly when she was the target of mercury poisoning administered via her herbal supplement pills – is herself a murderer. Bernard says she killed a Chinese family friend (sort of) who was trying to extort money from them. His body was found in a Premier Inn close to the M25.

Mrs Johnson is arrested. Her trial lasts a day, there is very little evidence against her (the body of the Chinese sort of friend was cremated quickly after his death), the evidence the prosecution claims to have isn’t shown in court, but she is convicted anyway and receives a suspended death sentence. Bernard doesn’t get his political asylum and is sent to prison himself. Boris, who was seen as going right to the very top in the next government, is under investigation too and is finished politically. Nothing is clear, except that there is the deepest corruption at the highest levels of the British politics.

Revealing documents and photos to be posted here soon on Gu Kailai, Bo Xilai and the Neil Heywood scandal: more rare first hand evidence in a story mostly built on rumours.

WSJ vs Sunday Times. The spy vs the accidental businessman

http://beijingcream.com/2012/11/the-sunday-times-neil-heywood-was-an-english-teaching-know-nothing-nobody/

Not a spy. Not a cad. Not a millionaire businessman. Sneak preview in The Sunday Times tomorrow ahead of Channel 4 special on Monday.  http://vimeo.com/53016890

https://vimeo.com/52939250

http://truevisiontv.com/films/details/161/chinese-murder-mystery

https://vimeo.com/52939250

http://truevisiontv.com/films/details/161/chinese-murder-mystery

She’s the daughter of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan’s current President. So will British-educated 22-year-old Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari now enter the violent political arena of her homeland?

At Edinburgh University she is known as Itty Bee, a gregarious final-year English literature student with a penchant for MIA, Jay-Z and impromptu boom-box-and-barbecue picnics with her close-knit circle of friends. Right now, she is, like most of her contemporaries, locked away in her bedroom, forcing on her “revision face” and keeping herself fortified with Diet Coke, political rapper Immortal Technique and regular bursts on Facebook. After several weeks of hard slog, she recently posted that her dissertation was finally in the ring binder. But with finals now upon her, there is still little time for going out.

When she gets on the train to London, however, Itty Bee enters a different world. Here, she dons a headscarf and becomes Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari, the eldest daughter of Benazir Bhutto; the scion of a clan that has gripped Pakistani politics for the past four decades. She has already experienced more than her fair share of family tragedy. Her mother was assassinated just a few months before she went to Edinburgh. She never knew her grandfather, who ruled Pakistan in the Seventies but was hanged in 1979. Two uncles have been murdered. And her father – whom she calls “Baba” – is Asif Ali Zardari, the President of a fractious country often described in the West as “the most dangerous place on Earth”.

As a result of all this, Itty, 22, has made friends with extreme caution. But very soon, after her graduation this summer, she will face some life-changing decisions. Will Itty, whose Urdu name, Bakhtawar, means “a harbinger of good luck”, choose to go into the family business that has already claimed so many Bhuttos? The answer is almost certainly yes. There is already a political buzz around her, with thousands of supporters following 20 Facebook pages dedicated to her, such as the one entitled “Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari, our great leader”.

We meet at Benazir’s old flat in Queen’s Gate, London, around the corner from the Natural History Museum. Scattered between tapestries and keepsakes from around the world are dozens of images of Benazir and Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967. Itty’s recently completed dissertation sits on the dining room table. Its title is telling: “Shakespeare’s political heroines in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Othello and The Winter’s Tale”. For Itty, these characters demonstrate how human frailty is the cause of failure, rather than fate or, especially, gender. It is a view her mother voiced repeatedly, having constantly lived with taunts from Pakistan’s male-dominated political system that women were politically incapable and naive.

Dressed in her trademark black, Itty settles into an armchair. Her BlackBerry is buzzing with messages from friends and relatives wanting to see her during the few days that she is in town. “I’m proud of my family,” she says, as her younger sister, Aseefa, 19, who is also studying in the UK, pours a Diet Coke.

For most of their childhood, Itty, Aseefa and older brother Bilawal lived with their mother in Dubai, where Benazir had gone into self-imposed exile after the collapse of her second government in 1996. The girls didn’t see their father, who was in prison in Pakistan on what the family maintain were politically motivated corruption charges. “By the time the authorities allowed us to have regular phone calls, I was almost a teenager and yet he was still telling me to go to bed by 8pm, not to watch television or read comics,” recalls Itty. “In Baba’s mind we must still have been the young kids we had been when he was arrested.”

These days, both parents are absent, although Itty and her sister stay in daily contact with their father on their phones. “Baba gets really cross when I don’t answer, and says he’s going to send in the Army,” jokes Aseefa. The image of a doting father massing troops to protect his kids sits oddly with President Zardari’s battered public persona back home, where newspapers portray him as vain, incapable of taming the military establishment, muddled, corrupt and never able to shake off the resulting monicker, Mr 10 Per Cent.

The endless sniping makes Itty fume and at Edinburgh she has earned a reputation asa fierce defender of the family name. “As part of my degree I took a course in South Asian studies and on the first day went into the lecture hall to find an enormous photo of Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who hanged my grandfather, projected on to the wall,” she says. “All the recommended books were telling me how my grandfather was the worst man in history. I had big arguments with the teacher. He didn’t like the Bhuttos.” She jumps up and starts pacing around the room: “I’m sick of hearing how corrupt my mother, my father and grandfather are supposed to be – until they die, of course. Then, they become the best thing Pakistan has ever had.”

In recent months, both she and her sister have started using Twitter to get their message across. Itty’s profile declares: “Proud daughter of shaheed [martyr] Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari.” Between them, they have nearly 50,000 followers, although for several days in May supporters were unable to pick up messages after Zardari’s Government banned Twitter, accusing the website of posting blasphemous content against Islam. Itty carried on tweeting anyway: on drone strikes, a bloody Nato attack against Pakistani troops last year and the continuing investigation into her mother’s assassination.

After the cushion of four years in academia, Itty is clearly aware that many eyes are on her. She will graduate this summer around the same time that her father begins plotting the PPP’s future. After a series of collisions with the country’s all-powerful military and its cantankerous judiciary, Zardari is widely predicted to call a general election in October, bringing his five-year term as President to an early end. Officially, it is Bilawal whose hat is in the ring to succeed him. A handsome Zardari lookalike and Oxford graduate, Bilawal is co-chairman of the PPP with his father. If Itty joins him in Pakistan, they will become a mirror image of the Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi brother-and-sister team across the border in India. And almost before we sit down, she is talking like a politician. “I want to continue my mother’s work on social issues such as women’s rights, education and poverty.

“I don’t consider myself Western,” she says. I do recognise that I’ve benefited from a UK education for the past four years, but otherwise I consider myself Eastern. I’ve got a lot to learn. I want to educate myself about my country. I want to wander around and see real life for myself. There’s an awful lot to do.” She talks about the country’s rapid slide towards religious extremism and how the population has more than doubled since her mother was in power. “There was one baby I saw in the flood-hit areas in 2010,” she says. “She was lying on the ground, covered in flies, while the mother just sat there. When I asked why she didn’t swat away the flies and pick her baby up, she looked at me and said, ‘This is how I was brought up, so why should I treat my child any differently?’ That’s one of the things that needs to be remedied in my country. We need to make life worth living.”

The last time I was here at the Queen’s Gate flat was in 2006, when I came to interview Benazir Bhutto on her self-imposed exile, only to discover that she was planning to end it. Then it was filled with advisers and chain-smoking party workers, talking up her plan to go home and contest new elections, having already served twice as Prime Minister.

Bilawal, Itty and Aseefa were away at school in Dubai. Zardari was recuperating, after his 11 years in prison, at a medical clinic in New York. It was a bizarre scene, with Benazir hopping around in jogging pants, picking at a plate of uncooked vegetables, her raw diet designed to get her in shape for the arduous campaign trail ahead, as calls from political leaders in three continents pinged around the living room.

Today the flat is quiet, although Itty gets minute-by-minute text updates about the storms raging in Pakistan. Her father, whom she has not seen for five months, is defending his coalition government against multiple challenges from the courts, the Opposition and the military. There are continuing attempts to prosecute him for corruption charges. There remain whispers of a coup in the offing and Pakistan’s relations with its closest Western ally, the United States, are at an all-time low following the revelation that Osama bin Laden lived in the country for up to nine years. Only last month, the two countries came to blows again after a Pakistani doctor, Shakeel Afridi, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for his role in helping the CIA monitor the bin Laden compound.

Itty’s life has been a political rollercoaster for as long as she can remember. “The family had one summer together after my mother was killed and before my father became president,” she recalls. “Our private time is very special. It’s the only time I can really relax.” When Aseefa last saw her father it was on official business, accompanying him to meet Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma in January this year. “They were joking about spending 11 years in prison,” Aseefa says. “Aung San Suu Kyi told my father the first ten years were the easiest.”

The closest the girls had to a normal life was between 1997 and 2004, when they were living in London and Dubai. “It was the only time we had Mama to ourselves,” says Itty. After she was killed in 2007 at the age of 54 and the children returned to Pakistan for the funeral, the local press declared open season on the Bhutto offspring, even ridiculing Itty for a rap she wrote in memory of her mother and uploaded to YouTube: “Shot in the back of your ear/ So young in 54th year/ Murdered with three kids left behind/ A hopeless nation without you, you are in all their hearts.”

Since then, the girls have kept a low profile. For the past three years, Aseefa has been living with her sister in Edinburgh, having enrolled at the city’s exclusive St George’s School for Girls. “Baba and Bilawal were in Pakistan. I just wanted to be near Itty,” she says, glancing at her sister. But she has just started a degree at another British university. “I don’t want to name it because I don’t want the attention,” she says apologetically. “Why not?” challenges Itty. “Everyone knows who you are anyway.”

Both girls understand the need for caution, Itty citing her launch of a relief charity during floods that crippled Pakistan in 2010. “It became some story about me starting a political party against my brother,” she says. “They said the dynasty was splitting. It’s total fiction. I want to support my brother. My mother always told us to be proud and to stick together.”

Keeping an eye on them today is Benazir’s younger sister Sanam Bhutto, their default mother. “Sticking together is the most important thing,” Sanam says, nodding at the girls, who call her Aunty Sunny. “My father [Zulfikar Ali Bhutto] used to say, ‘You kids must hold together like a fist. Individual fingers can be broken, but together as a fist you are strong.’” Not all of Zulfikar’s children heeded his advice. Benazir’s oldest brother Murtaza, who set up a political movement to rival his sister, was shot dead in 1996, a crime pinned for a time on Zardari, while Shahnawaz, Zulfikar’s younger son, was poisoned during a family holiday in Nice, France, in 1985. Only Sanam, who has lived in London since her father was killed, has shunned politics. “That’s why I’m still alive,” she says grimly.

Despite the risks, Itty is keen to get back to Pakistan this summer, although she is well aware some will not welcome her. “People say to me, ‘What do you know about Pakistan? You don’t know how we suffer.’ But our family has also suffered so much for Pakistan.” When Itty thinks of home, she thinks of Bilawal House, the family home in Karachi, where she spent her first six years. When she returned in 2004 to greet her father on his release from prison, she found all her childhood toys still in her bedroom, arranged by her mother. “Even now, I feel like I’m literally coming home, my mother’s make-up is still in her bedroom, our family photo albums are still on the shelves.”

Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari’s life has been overshadowed by Pakistani politics, from her birth. Benazir Bhutto became pregnant with her second child in March 1989, just three months after being voted into office, the first woman elected to govern a Muslim state. She kept the pregnancy a secret for as long as possible, determined that the men around her should not exploit the situation.

“Once they learnt I was pregnant, all hell broke loose,” Benazir told me in 2006. Facing a parliamentary vote that it was unconstitutional to have a pregnant head of government, she secretly arranged to have her daughter delivered by Caesarean section. “I drove over to Bilawal House wearing a burka,” Sanam says today. “We swapped places and then she drove off in the burka to the hospital. Nobody had a clue.” The following day, Benazir was back on the job. Sanam beams: “As a baby, she was so tiny my sister called her Itty after the song, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie,” she says, explaining the pet name.

Seven months after Itty’s birth, Benazir was ejected from office on corruption charges. Zardari was arrested, accused along with his wife of accepting millions in bribes. But in October 1993, she was voted back into power and the family was reunited at the Prime Minister’s house in Islamabad. Then in November 1996, Benazir’s government was again overthrown, Zardari was rearrested and the children sent abroad.

Zardari was finally released in December 2004. Itty remembers the summers following his release as “the best times ever. We’d all go off to the US, where Dad was undergoing medical treatment. He was known as Mr Ali so we could just disappear from the scene.”

However, by 2007, politics again loomed. Pakistan was reeling amid a wave of suicide bombing and support for President Pervez Musharraf, a general who had seized power in a military coup in 1999, was dwindling. Behind the scenes in London, Washington and Dubai, the PPP, spurred on by the British Foreign Office and the US State Department, secretly hatched plans to return Benazir to Pakistan.Itty says they were not unduly worried. “We were excited about her going back because we knew how happy she was to return. We didn’t think, ‘It’s a life and death thing.’”

Benazir told me before leaving for Pakistan that autumn that she was not frightened;she had survived several attempts on her life already. However, she had not witnessed the growth of the lawless Pakistan Taleban, a deadly and invidious force aimed against domestic targets. Within hours of her arrival on October 18, 2007, she was targeted again.

Itty reveals that her mother had asked her daughters to accompany her. “But I was sitting my A-levels two weeks later,” she recalls. “So we stayed at home with Baba and followed it all on TV.” That night, Benazir’s tank-like lorry wound its way through Karachi flanked by supporters chanting, “Long live Bhutto.” Itty remained in touch with her mother by text and e-mail. “She was waving with one hand and messaging me on with the other. We were discussing my university application form.”

Just before midnight on October 18, after the girls went to bed, two huge explosions rocked Benazir’s convoy, killing 126 people. She had just ducked down into the truck to remove her sandals, so survived the blast. Even more horrific was Benazir’s belief that one of the two bombs had been attached to a baby. “Just before the blast, a man was trying to pass this child to her and she almost took it,” says Itty. “After realising there were too many people, she gesticulated not to bring her the baby and the security van behind took it instead. That’s when the first explosion happened.”

Benazir returned to Dubai, telling her family she was shocked at just how far Pakistan had fallen. But when Musharraf declared a state of emergency soon after, she decided to go back. “Mama came into my room the night before leaving,” says Aseefa. “She said, ‘Don’t wake up tomorrow morning. We will say goodbye now.’” But Aseefa insisted on coming to the airport anyway. “In the lounge Mama said, ‘Come with me, you can sit on my lap on the plane.’ And I said no, I had school,” she recalls, sobbing. “I wish I’d gone with her. I should have been with her. My biggest regret ever is that I didn’t go with her on that last trip.”

Their worst fears were realised on December 27, 2007. The family were at home in Dubai watching television when a news flash popped up. Benazir had been injured during a gun and suicide bomb attack as she left a rally in Rawalpindi. Dozens of PPP supporters were dead. “I remember it like it happened yesterday,” says Itty. While her father and brother tried to find a plane to take them there at short notice, “I was ringing up all these people in Pakistan, demanding updates about her condition. I thought she was just injured, that we would see her in the hospital… But nobody was telling me the truth.”

On the way to the airport, she listened as her father took a call. “I heard him say, ‘You must put the body on ice,’ and my world turned upside down.”

It was chaos when the family landed in Karachi. Itty recalls, “My father and brother were taken in an ambulance with my mother’s body and the doors didn’t even close properly.”

The funeral was held in Naudero, the Bhuttos’ ancestral village near Larkana, in Sindh province, 400 miles to the north. “It was unreal,” says Aseefa. “People were so upset they were setting themselves on fire. All I wanted was to have a little time alone with her. But people were desperate with grief. They were climbing on to the roof of our house and breaking all the windows.”

Aseefa says that after the funeral, Zardari told his children he was ready to pack the family up and get them as far away from Pakistani politics as he could. But when he found that Benazir had placed him in charge of the party founded by her father he pledged to stay. “We were all in a room together when he read out my mother’s will,” says Itty. Almost immediately, Zardari suggested that Bilawal should stand as PPP chairman. “It was his idea, not anyone else’s. He had tears in his eyes. He said we have to let the party vote.” At the time it was widely reported that he was so desperate to seize power that he had faked his wife’s will, but Aseefa says it was the opposite. “He was angry and upset. He wanted to get us away from politics until we were married with children. He himself had no intention.”

After the funeral, Zardari and Bilawal remained in Pakistan to contest the elections of February 2008, while Itty and Aseefa returned to Dubai. “It didn’t hit home that Mama really was not there,” says Aseefa, “until I came home from school one day months later with a good grade for my essay.I wanted to show her like I used to. Finally, I knew I would never be able to do that again.”

During my last interview with Benazir Bhutto, she admitted that her children had suffered as a result of her political career. “With me coming and going, I always worried they were fearful I wouldn’t return, like their father didn’t return one day. I told them no matter what I would always be back.”

Now she is gone, Bhutto’s daughters say they respect their mother’s choices. “I’m not angry,” says Itty. “I’m just sad it has to be this way.” She also understands the political legacy that Benazir has left behind. Like her mother, Itty is resolute that home is Pakistan, whatever the chattering classes in Islamabad say about her foreign upbringing. She also has a clear sense of duty. “I want to stand up and be counted; to make an effort to help my country.” That voice, if you close your eyes, is her mother’s voice.