The PPP government has thrown its entire political weight behind the case. At least 50 PPP stalwarts were present in the court on the first day of the hearing. Bhutto's trial has been termed by a large section of politicians and jurists as "judicial murder" of one of the most popular leader of the country.
Reacting on the retrial of Bhutto's case during a press conference in Ankara on Wednesday, Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari said: "We do not want revenge in history ... we just want that a historical wrong is corrected. If in future someone commits a similar wrong, then he would know that history will never forgive him."
Babar Awan, who resigned from his post to fight the case, said "I give priority to the case than the ministry. For me, it's a great honour to be the lawyer of ZAB in his retrial". He dubbed the case as retrial of the century.
Chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry appreciated Awan's move and remarked the gesture as "historic."
"We are taking the issue very seriously and will give it due importance," Chaudhry said before adjourning the hearing till Thursday.
President Zardari had filed a reference in the Supreme Court last week, asking it to revisit the verdict which sent the former premier to the gallows in 1979. Article 186 of Pakistan's constitution empowers the president "to obtain the opinion of the Supreme Court on any question of law which he considers of public importance".
The presidential reference asked the court to give its opinion on whether justice was done to Mr Bhutto or not. The judgment of hanging the country's first elected prime minister was considered so bad that it had never since been referred to or quoted in any of Pakistan's case law. Dr Nasim Hassan Shah, one of the members of the bench which awarded the death penalty to Mr Bhutto, admitted in his book, "Memoires and Reflections", that there was severe political pressure on the judges from General Zia ul Haq to give Mr Bhutto capital punishment.
But filing a reference at this time is believed to be a shrewd political move by president Zardari, aiming to counter the pressure of the Supreme Court on the one hand and to mobilize the workers of his party on the other. Zardari's tussle with the judiciary had started since he refused to restore the judges who were deposed by the former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.
The restored Supreme Court embarrassed Zardari for the first time when it directed the government to ask the Swiss authorities for reopening of the money laundering and corruption cases against him. The government, however, did not comply to implement the court order. Since then Zardari was besieged by the SC on several counts but the government of his party did not obey to implement court orders.
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