PAKISTAN: Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto visits her father's mausoleum

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto visits her father's mausoleum in their ancestral village of Garhi Khuda Baksh, in southern Pakistan, just days after an assassination bid that left 139 people dead. Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto travelled to her ancestral home in southern Pakistan Saturday (October 27) to pay her respects at her father's grave. Security personnel and supporters surrounded her bullet-proof vehicle as it made its way to the family mausoleum. Standing through a sunroof behind her secretary, Bhutto waved to the thousands who were prevented from approaching the vehicle by security staff wielding AK-47s. At the mausoleum, Bhutto offered prayers and sprinkled flowers over the tomb of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister. He was toppled and later hanged by the military in 1979. The visit is Bhutto's first foray out of Karachi after at least one suicide bomber, possibly two, attacked her convoy in Pakistan's largest city as it travelled slowly through a crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters shortly after her return from an 8-year, self-imposed exile. More than 100 died in the attack. The government blames the Karachi attack on Islamist militants based in tribal lands bordering Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban are entrenched. Bhutto suspects political allies of President Pervez Musharraf were also plotting against her, although she says she has no reason to believe he personally was involved. Musharraf granted an amnesty that allowed Bhutto to return to Pakistan without fear of prosecution in graft cases hanging over her from the 1990. There is speculation the pair could end up sharing power after national elections due by early January. Such a union would be welcomed by the United States, which is worried by rising militancy in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Violence has escalated across Pakistan since July, when militants scrapped a peace deal and the army stormed a radical mosque in the capital, Islamabad.

ITN Source | October 27, 2007

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