WASHINGTON, June 11: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto tops the list of President Pervez Musharraf’s most likely challengers, a US newspaper’s list published on Monday showed.

The USA Today list shows that even after eight years of military rule and continued efforts to discredit them, Ms Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif remain the two most influential politicians in Pakistan.

Their parties – PPP and PML-N – are also shown as the two strongest political groups.

The third on the list is Imran Khan while Jamaat-i-Islami’s Qazi Hussain Ahmad occupies sixth place.

But there are two surprise entries for the fourth and fifth places: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and his lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan.

Ms Bhutto, 53, is still popular in Sindh and among secular middle-class Pakistanis, the paper notes, adding that her relationship to ‘the executed populist’ Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto remains her main political strength.

Despite vilification by both the Sharif and Musharraf governments, she remains “the most popular democratic politician in Pakistan” with a “large, well-organised political party”.