Bhutto's body flown to home province with family

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The body of Benazir Bhutto was flown to the southern Pakistani province of Sindh early on Friday for burial in her family graveyard alongside her father, party officials said.

Bhutto, a two-time prime minister who had hoped to win power again in a January 8 election, was killed by a suicide bomber on Thursday while leaving an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad.

Her body was flown to Sukkur town from Islamabad in a C-130 military aircraft, accompanied by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and their three children shortly after they arrived from Dubai.

The body will be taken to her native village of Garhi Khuda Baksh, in Larkana district, where she will be buried next to her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

According to Islamic tradition, funerals should be held as quickly as possible. Party officials said they expected the funeral would be held on Friday.

Tension was running high in Sindh province and its capital, Karachi, Bhutto's home town. Protesters torched dozens of cars and set fire to banks and government offices in several towns and cities, witnesses and police said.

"People are very angry. They attacked banks and government offices. There were no police anywhere. Two shops selling weapons were also looted," said Maula Baksh, a journalist based in Larkana.

Bhutto's father, the country's first popularly elected prime minister, was toppled by the military in 1977 and later hanged.

Zardari is a businessman and served as a government minister during one of Bhutto's terms as prime minister in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Bhutto's body was earlier taken from the hospital in Rawalpindi, where she was pronounced dead after the attack, to the airport.

Hundreds of distraught supporters bore her plain wooden coffin aloft from the hospital to an ambulance that took it to Rawalpindi's military airport.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan from an eight year exile in October and later paid an emotional visit to her native village.

(Reporting by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)