By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: The mayor of Karachi moved late on Saturday to shut down a wave of speculation that has consumed Pakistani social media for days: reports that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party and son of President Asif Ali Zardari, was engaged to marry a woman from the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein.
“The news story regarding Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s engagement or wedding is incorrect and unfounded,” Murtaza Wahab, who serves as Karachi’s mayor and doubles as a spokesman for Bhutto Zardari, wrote in a post on X. He offered no elaboration.
Neither Bhutto Zardari, 38, nor anyone else in his family has said anything publicly about the matter, leaving Wahab’s brief statement as the party’s only word on a rumour that had, by Saturday, migrated from fringe social media accounts into mainstream Pakistani news coverage.
The speculation traces back to reports, unattributed to any named source, claiming that the elder Zardari had travelled to Liechtenstein — a mountainous, German-speaking microstate wedged between Switzerland and Austria, with a population of roughly 40,000 — to meet with the family of his son’s prospective bride and settle on a wedding date. Some accounts identified the woman only as being from Vaduz, Liechtenstein’s capital; others described her, without corroboration, as connected to European royalty. The wedding, according to the same unverified reports, was being planned for later this year.
One Urdu-language outlet, Daily Ausaf, published a report asserting that preparations for the wedding were underway and that President Zardari’s travels were tied directly to the arrangements. The report did not name its sources, and it was later removed from the outlet’s site without explanation.
The elder Zardari’s whereabouts had already drawn attention before the wedding rumours surfaced. On Aug. 27, Pakistan’s Presidency posted on X that the president “has proceeded abroad on a private visit,” giving no destination and no purpose — an omission that, in the absence of any other explanation, helped fuel the speculation that followed.
It is not the first time a Zardari’s personal life has become fodder for rumour in Pakistan. The president himself was the subject of persistent, and ultimately unsubstantiated, marriage rumours more than a decade ago, when reports claimed he had secretly wed a Pakistani-American physician. His office denounced those reports at the time as well.
For Bhutto Zardari — the son of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and heir to one of Pakistan’s most prominent political dynasties — questions about his marital status have become something of a recurring feature of his public life, one he has handled with a mix of humour and evasion over the years.
At the United Nations General Assembly in 2022, when he was serving as Pakistan’s foreign minister, a reporter asked him directly about his marriage plans. “Of course, I have plans to marry,” he said, smiling, before declining to say when. The previous year, according to Pakistani news accounts, he grew visibly irritated when pressed on the same subject, responding, “Am I supposed to get married, or are you?” and asking the journalist whether a particular woman had prompted the question.
He has been more expansive, if no more specific, at other moments. In 2016, he told an interviewer that whoever he eventually married would first have to win the approval of his sisters — a bar he described as a high one. “The right candidate will first have to win over the hearts of my sisters,” he said. “I have to take them into confidence. And winning over the hearts of my sisters is a very difficult task for any girl.”
For now, the party’s position is that there is no engagement to discuss. Whether that puts the matter to rest, or simply pauses it until the next round of speculation, is an open question — one that has followed Bhutto Zardari, on and off, for the better part of a decade.
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