PAKISTAN: Pakistan's former Prime Ministe Benazir Bhutto departs for ancestral hometown amidst tight security

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto leaves Karachi to visit her ancestral hometown and visit the tomb of her father amidst tight security. Security was tight in and around the ancestral hometown of former Pakstani prime minister Benazir Bhutto ahead of her visit on Saturday (October 27), just days after an assassination attempt that left 139 people dead. Armed security personnel surrounded the family mausoleum which Bhutto was due to visit to pay her respects to her father, a former prime minister and leader of the Pakistan's People Party (PPP), and also lay a claim to his legacy. PPP party flags and portraits of Bhutto and her father lined the roads in the countryside around Larkana, where farmers were busy harvesting their rice crops. At least one suicide bomber, possibly two, attacked her convoy in Karachi as it travelled slowly through a crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters shortly after her return from an 8-year, self-imposed exile. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister, was toppled and later hanged by the military in 1979. 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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