'Bhutto son not keen to be successor'

NAUDERO: Benazir Bhutto's son is not keen to be named as the new leader of the assassinated former Pakistani premier's party, one of her close aides said on Sunday.   

"Unlikely," close Bhutto aide Sherry Rehman told AFP when asked if the opposition leader's 19-year-old Bilawal would be named as chief of the Pakistan People's Party at a meeting later on Sunday.   

"He is not very keen to enter the political arena here. He is young, he is going back to study -- for God's sake he is barely 20 years old," she said.   

Bilawal, a student at Britain's Oxford University, is set to read out Bhutto's will ahead of a meeting of the party's central committee at the family home in southern Pakistan later on Sunday.   

Other party officials however have insisted that Bilawal remains the frontrunner for the top slot.   

They said that if he were chosen, the party may set up an advisory council led by his father, Bhutto's widower Asif Zardari, until he finishes studying and can lead the party full-time.   

Bhutto was killed in a gun and suicide bomb attack at a political rally on Thursday, becoming the latest member of her family to meet a violent death after her father and two brothers.