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After offering fateha at the graves of Benazir Bhutto, her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and brothers Mir Murtaza and Shanawaz, people were seeing going to the exhibition held near the mausoleum.
The collection of photographs portrayed the ups and downs of the Bhutto family. Looking at the pictures, it seemed as if history was moving before your eyes.
Taken since 1971 to date, he has a collection of 35,000 photos, Agha Feroze told Dawn, and said that only 4,000 rare photographs had been put on display in the exhibition.
He said that a large number of PPP workers had visited his exhibition but “I anxiously waited for Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. Had he spared a few moments for the exhibition, I would have requested him to provide employment to my children.”
Currently PRO to Sinh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah, the photographer said that he had been jailed several times for his association with the Bhutto family.
“During Gen Zia`s martial law and on other occasions also.”
When asked about the origin of his association with the Bhutto family, he said that he was a prisoner of war in Bangladesh after the debacle of East Pakistan and was released and brought home due to the efforts made by the then prime minister Z.A. Bhutto.
“This is why I started loving Z.A. Bhutto. I took first photograph of the Bhutto family in 1975,” he said.
Born in 1958, Agha Feroze can speak 17 languages. “I had learnt the languages by listening to programmes of different radio stations.” he said.
He said that he came close to Begum Nusrat Bhutto when she employed him as a Persian-Urdu translator to help her write speeches for her mass contact campaign after her husband`s elected government was toppled by Gen Ziaul Haq and he was arrested in a murder case.
Comparing his past with the present, he said: “In yesteryears I flew in helicopters with Benazir Bhutto but now I travel on an old motorcycle.”
Going into flashback, he said that once Benazir Bhutto had offloaded a top bureaucrat from a plane to accommodate him. Sometimes he was solely flown in a helicopter to cover an event,” he said.