Benazir Bhutto assassinated

CNN has a report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who was challenging Perfez Musharraf for Pakistan's Prime Ministership. Pray for Pakistan.

The body of Pakistan's assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was being flown home Friday, as sporadic violence was reported in cities across the country.
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Bhutto supporters grieve at the hospital in Rawalpindi where was pronounced dead.
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Bhutto was killed Thursday leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi. The Interior Ministry said she died from a gun shot wound to the neck, fired by an attacker who then detonated a bomb killing 22 other people.

Angry mobs took to the streets, blocking roads, torching cars and pelting rocks at police, local television footage showed.

Police fired on a crowd, killing two people, in the city of Khairpur in the Sindh province, GEO TV reported. In Peshawar, officers used tear gas and batons to break up a demonstration, the station said.

Authorities called for calm and police asked residents to stay inside.

Many obliged, shuttering shops or rushing home from work, and surrendering the streets to protesters who set fire to banks, shops, gas stations and more, Pakistani media reported.

It's all mayhem everywhere," Shehryar Ahmad, an investment banker in Karachi, told CNN by telephone. "There's absolutely no order of any kind. No army on the streets. No curfew."

Ahmad said that he saw dozens of burned-out cars as he drove home from work. A one-mile strip leading to Bhutto's Karachi house was a "ghost town," he said.

Bhutto's body was being transported to the family's ancestral graveyard in Gari-Khuda Baksh in Sindh province, where she will be buried later Friday, said Sen. Safdar Abbasi, a leader of her Pakistan People's Party.
The first leg was completed when, according to Pakistani TV stations, a Pakistan Air Force plane landed at Sukkur at about 3:15 a.m. Friday (5:30 p.m. Thursday ET).

Bhutto is expected to be taken the rest of the way to her ancestral home by helicopter. Authorities are avoiding road travel because it could be mobbed by grieving supporters, the television stations reported.

Her coffin body was removed from Rawalpindi General Hospital late Thursday -- carried above a crowd of grieving supporters. Video Watch Bhutto's casket carried from the hospital »

Bhutto spent her final moments giving a stirring address to thousands of supporters at a political rally in a park in Rawalpindi, a city of roughly 1.5 million that is 14 km (9 miles) south of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

She climbed into a white Land Rover and stood through the sunroof to wave to crowds after the speech.

It was then that someone fired two shots, and Bhutto slumped back into the vehicle, said John Moore, a news photographer with Getty Images who saw what happened.

Seconds later an explosion rocked the park, sending orange flames into the throng of Bhutto supporters and littering the park with twisted metal and chunks of rubble. The carnage was everywhere, he said.


The assassination happened in Liaquat Bagh Park, named for Pakistan's first prime minister -- Liaquat Ali Khan -- who was assassinated in the same location in 1951.

The attack came just hours after four supporters of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif died when members of another political party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport Thursday, Pakistan police said.

Several other members of Sharif's party were wounded, police said.

Bhutto, who led Pakistan from 1988-1990 and 1993-96, but both times the sitting president dismissed her amid corruption allegations. She was the first female prime minister of any Islamic nation, and was participating in the parliamentary election set for January 8, hoping for a third term as prime minister. Video Watch Benazir Bhutto obituary »

A terror attack targeting her motorcade in Karachi killed 136 people on the day she returned to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile.
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Bhutto had been critical of what she believed was a lack of effort by Musharraf's government to protect her. View timeline »

Two weeks after the October assassination attempt, she wrote a commentary for CNN.com in which she questioned why Pakistan investigators refused international offers of help in finding the attackers.