Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who served as the fourth President of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973 and as the ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977. He was the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the largest and most influential political party in Pakistan. His daughter Benazir Bhutto also served twice as prime minister. She was assassinated on 27 December 2007. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States and University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, Bhutto was noted for his economic initiatives and authoring and administrating Pakistan's nuclear weapons research programme, for this he is known as the Father of the Nuclear Programme. He was executed in 1979 after the Supreme Court of Pakistan sentenced him to death for authorising the murder of a political opponent in a move that many believe was carried out under the directives of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.