Bhutto buried, violence stalks Pakistan

Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, on their wedding day, at Clifton Palace, Karachi, Pakistan, December 1987.

By Faisal Aziz

GARHI KHUDA BAKHSH, Pakistan (Reuters) - Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest next to her father in the family mausoleum on Friday after the opposition leader's assassination plunged Pakistan into crisis and triggered violent protests across her native Sindh province.

Tens of thousands of mourners wept and beat their heads as Bhutto, killed by a suicide attacker at an election rally on Thursday, was carried from her ancestral home in Sindh, in the south of the country, to the domed mausoleum.

The death of the 54-year-old Bhutto stoked fears that a January 8 election meant to return Pakistan to civilian rule could be put off amid a backlash that threatened to engulf the embattled President Pervez Musharraf.

Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, wept as he accompanied the closed coffin, draped with the green, red and black tricolor of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, on the 7-km journey to the tomb in the dusty village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. READ MORE