(CNN) — Assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest alongside her father in her ancestral home of Garhi-Khuda Baksh after a chaotic funeral procession and scenes of violence in Pakistan on Friday.
Bhutto’s casket is carried out of Rawalpindi General Hospital by her supporters.
The throngs of her grieving supporters crushed up against the flag-draped coffin, while minor scuffles also broke out.
Violence had earlier erupted in Pakistan in the hours before Bhutto’s funeral started, with at least nine people reported killed and banks, train stations and cars torched.
It was initially reported that Bhutto, 54, was killed on Thursday after a public rally in Rawalpindi by the bullets of an assassin who blew himself up after firing the shots.
But the surgeon who operated on her, Dr Mussadiq Khan, told the Associated Press on Friday that Bhutto was killed by shrapnel from the blast — from which at least 28 more people died and at least 100 were wounded. Khan said “no bullet was found in her body.”
Her father and former prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in the same northern city in 1979.
Bhutto’s body arrived in the hours before dawn at Garhi-Khuda Baksh after a long journey by plane, helicopter and ambulance.
The opposition leader’s family — her husband Asif Ali Zardari and three children — accompanied the body aboard a Pakistani Air Force C-130 transport plane to Sukkor but traveled by bus from there to Larkana and on to Garhi-Khuda Baksh.
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Bhutto’s family had requested a private funeral.
Another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, told CNN on Friday that he had planned to attend Bhutto’s funeral, but was advised not to by Zardari, who cited security concerns.
“He said that we must not come today in view of these inadequate security arrangements,” Sharif said. “The security arrangements are far from satisfactory.”
In the aftermath of the assassination, the prime minister’s office has launched a judicial inquiry and the Ministry of the Interior is setting up a police inquiry, according to Information Minister Nisar Memon.
Memon said no decision had been made to postpone parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8.
“We remain on course,” he said.
Sharif, who visited the hospital to pay his respects to Bhutto, later announced that he and his party would boycott the elections.
Bhutto, who was campaigning for the elections, had completed an election rally minutes earlier and was leaving the rally site, Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh Park, at the time of the attack.
As a shocked Pakistan absorbed the news of Bhutto’s death, authorities called for calm and 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 and gas stations, blocked roads and pelted police with rocks, Pakistani media reported.
At least five people were killed in Karachi in the violence, GEO-TV reported, and dozens more were wounded. Police in Khairpur fired on an angry mob, killing two people, the station reported, and two more people were killed in Larkana.
“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 as he drove back from work, he counted the burned-out shells of dozens of cars. A one-mile strip leading to Bhutto’s Karachi house was a “ghost town,” he said.
“A lot of government buildings and many vehicles have been burned by the angry protesters,” said Majid Siddiqui of GEO-TV.
In Sindh province, where Karachi is located, police said demonstrators had burned a dozen banks, set two train stations on fire, along with three trains. Since Thursday, 240 vehicles have been burned.
Because of the violence, paramilitary forces in Sindh were told to “shoot on sight” anyone causing civil disturbances, a spokesman for the Pakistan Rangers said.
Local media reported that in some areas, police were on the streets but were avoiding direct confrontation with the mobs, not wanting to inflame an already tense situation.
But by Friday morning, Pakistani media reported that an uneasy calm had spread across the shaken country, now marking a three-day period of mourning declared by President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto’s coffin was removed from Rawalpindi General Hospital late on Thursday — carried above a crowd of grieving supporters.
Bhutto spent her final moments giving a stirring address to thousands of supporters at 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 Sharif died when members of another political party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport on Thursday, Pakistan police said.
Bhutto 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.
A terror attack targeting her motorcade in Karachi in October killed 136 people on the day she returned to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile.
[CNN]
Bhutto had been critical of what she believed was a lack of effort by President Musharraf‘s government to protect he
Hundreds of thousands of people in the surrounding streets almost brought the procession to a standstill before it finally reached the mausoleum.