Bhutto's body arrives at family home for burial
NAUDERO, Pakistan (Reuters) - Thousands of mourners thronged to assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's ancestral home on Friday ahead of her burial in her family graveyard alongside her father.
Bhutto, a two-time prime minister hoping to win power again in a January 8 election, was killed by a suicide bomber on Thursday after addressing a rally in the city of Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad.
Bhutto's body, accompanied by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and their three children, was flown in a military aircraft to her home province of Sindh in the south of the country hours after she was killed.
People started crying and wailing as Bhutto's coffin was brought to her family home in an ambulance.
"Show patience. Give us courage to bear this loss," Zardari urged the mourners as the coffin was carried into the house.
President Pervez Musharraf, for years a rival of Bhutto, condemned the killing and announced three days of mourning. Schools and banks will also be closed.
Bhutto's party said it would observe a 40-day period of mourning while another opposition leader and former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has called for a nationwide strike on Friday.
Residents of Larkana district, where the Bhutto family has for generations been big land owners, said a grave for Bhutto was being dug at the family graveyard in Garhi Khuda Baksh, a village 5 km (3 miles) from the Bhutto home in the small town of Naudero.
She will be buried next to her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the country's first popularly elected prime minister, toppled by the military in 1977 and later hanged.
According to Islamic tradition, funerals should be held as quickly as possible. Party officials said the funeral would be held on Friday.
"VERY ANGRY"
Tension was running high in Sindh province and its capital, Karachi, where Bhutto was born in 1953. 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 returned to Pakistan from eight years of self-imposed exile in October.
She survived an assassination attempt during her homecoming procession in Karachi. About 140 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives near her vehicle as it inched its way through a throng of supporters.
Days later she paid an emotional visit to her family's home village.
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.
(Additional reporting and writing by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)
