Prime Minister

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Less than two weeks before this country's crucial Feb. 18 elections, the man who supplanted slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as Pakistan's most widely known politician has left the country. It's a peculiar absence in the middle of a political campaign, but one that reflects a growing belief that the coming election likely will be marked by widespread vote-rigging and fraud. Nawaz Sharif, a two-time former prime minister, went to the United Arab Emirates this week, apparently to be with his wife as she underwent surgery in Dubai.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Acting in accordance with her last wishes, Benazir Bhutto's party named her 19-year-old son as its ceremonial leader and her husband as the executor of its day-to-day affairs as violence that had flared in Pakistan after her assassination subsided yesterday. The decision to bypass experienced senior politicians in the party hierarchy showed the slain opposition leader's steely determination to posthumously ensure the continuation of one of the country's most enduring political dynasties, even though her son is too young to contest office and her husband is shadowed by corruption allegations.

April 4, 1979: Benazir Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is executed for the murder of a political opponent, two years after his ouster as prime minister in a military coup. April 10, 1986: Benazir Bhutto returns from exile in London to lead the Pakistan People's Party, founded by her father. Dec. 1, 1988: Bhutto, age 35, wins parliamentary elections to become the first female prime minister of a Muslim nation. Aug. 6, 1990: President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismisses Bhutto's government, citing corruption and a failure to control ethnic violence.

The assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was a shot heard around the world, sparking World War I. In 1948, the killing of Mahatma Gandhi, India's spiritual and political leader, helped galvanize a newly independent nation. And some observers believe the killing of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 initially helped but ultimately foiled further peace plans for the region. Over the past century, assassinations of heads of state and other prominent leaders such as the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Rabin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the Middle East have shifted the course of history one way or another.

To Javaid Manzoor, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was more than the dynamic populist he believed was capable of propelling Pakistan toward true democracy. She was also a friend. When Manzoor's mother died in October, Bhutto visited her friend's Potomac home to offer condolences, making it her first stop upon arriving in Washington for a busy political trip. Manzoor, who had worked closely with Bhutto as president of the Washington chapter of her Pakistan People's Party, was stunned and distraught yesterday to learn of his hero's assassination.

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir V. Putin formally declared yesterday that he intends to become prime minister next year, ensuring his dominance of the Russian government even after his term ends. Putin said at a meeting of his party, United Russia, that he had accepted an offer from his close aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, to move to the prime minister's office if Medvedev wins the presidency in March, which is likely. "If our people will trust Mr. Medvedev and elect him the new president of the Russian federation, I will be prepared to continue our joint work, in this case in the position of premier of the government," Putin said.

JERUSALEM -- Hamas police in Gaza arrested an aide to the Ramallah-based Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, yesterday, holding the aide for questioning, a Hamas spokesman said. The aide, Omar al-Ghul, 56, is a political adviser on Gaza to Fayyad, who was appointed prime minister by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas took over Gaza in fighting last June. Ghul returned to Gaza from Ramallah to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law, and the Hamas police came to arrest him about 1:30 a.m., according to his son, Nadir al-Ghul, who is in Ramallah.

BAGHDAD -- Two prominent lawmakers, including a former prime minister, escaped assassination yesterday when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint near their offices here and killed two guards. Neither former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi nor Saleh Mutlaq was in the country. Both condemned the attack as a sign of rampant lawlessness in Iraq despite U.S. and Iraqi claims of greatly improved security. A statement from Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party said it was the second such attack on the secular Shiite in two days.

LONDON -- When he took office last summer, Prime Minister Gordon Brown presented himself as the anti-Tony Blair: colorless but capable, dour but trustworthy. The idea was that he would be a burst of cool Scottish forthrightness after the murky spin and dissembling that had come to cloud perceptions of Blair's played-out government. It is a hard trick to pull off, dissociating yourself so completely from someone for whom you worked for a decade, as Brown had for Blair. At first, the new prime minister seemed to have succeeded.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been barred from running in January's parliamentary elections because of a previous conviction, Pakistan's election commission announced yesterday. A spokesman for Sharif, Ahsan Iqbal, said that the barring of Sharif was part of a plan by President Pervez Musharraf and his supporters to rig the elections, and that Sharif's lawyers would contest the decision. Sharif, a leading opposition figure who was overthrown in a military coup in 1999, was allowed to return from exile last week, and filed nomination papers to represent a district of his home city of Lahore in the parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 8. But other candidates in the district challenged his nomination on the grounds that he was convicted in 2000 of hijacking a plane carrying Musharraf, who was then head of the army, an act that precipitated the bloodless coup.