Bhutto laid to rest beside father
Hundreds of thousands of mourners gathered for the funeral of Benazir Bhutto today in front of her family mausoleum.
The former Pakistan prime minister was interred beside her father near their ancestral home.
Bhutto supporters arrived by tractors, buses, cars and jeeps that were parked in dusty fields surrounding the vast, marble mausoleum.
Weeping in grief and chanting slogans against figures in the pro-government political party, they formed into hundreds of rows for the funeral prayers.
The plain wood coffin, draped in the red, green and black flag of her Pakistan People's Party, was carried in a white ambulance on three-mile journey to its resting place in her ancestral village Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, where her father and former prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, is also buried.
On the road, the ambulance passed a railway crossing where a passenger train had been set on fire by rioters enraged by Ms Bhutto's assassination. The engine was still burning.
Sings that had been erected two months ago to mark Ms Bhutto's return from exile to Pakistan still dotted the route. On one, someone had scrawled: "Benazir you are the hope for the poor."
In front of the mausoleum, with its three domes, mourners cried and hugged each other, and waited for the coffin to be shifted from the ambulance.
Some waved the People's Party tricolour and shouted: "As long as the moon and sun are alive, so is the name of Bhutto."
Zulfiqar Bhutto, who formed the party and is an iconic leader in Pakistan's troubled 60-year history, was executed in 1979 during the military regime of the late dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, after he was convicted of conspiring to murder a political rival.
