Mourners weep, shout slogans as Bhutto is buried

GARHI KHUDA BAKHSH, Pakistan — Many among the mourners chanted for justice and blamed the government for their heroine's death. Others jostled to get a last glimpse of the flag-draped coffin. Some simply wept and hugged each other.

The funeral for assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Friday in southern Pakistan was permeated with raw emotion for the hundreds of thousands of admirers who converged on her family's mausoleum here.

People crammed inside the cavernous hall, throwing rose petals on the coffin. Some cried out "Benazir is alive" as her body was laid to rest. One man fainted and another sobbed uncontrollably, crying "My sister has gone."

On the day Bhutto was laid to rest, Pakistan's government announced it had evidence that an al-Qaida operative was behind her assassination, and the army tried to quell a frenzy of rioting that left 27 people dead less than two weeks before national elections.

The government, led by President Pervez Musharraf, also said Bhutto was not killed by gunshots or shrapnel as originally claimed. Instead, it said her skull was shattered by the force of a suicide bomb blast that slammed her against a lever in her car's sunroof.

The new explanations by the government in the death of Bhutto, Musharraf's most powerful foe in the elections, were part of a rapidly evolving political crisis. The rioting by Bhutto's furious supporters raised concerns that this nuclear-armed nation, plagued by chaos and the growing threat from Islamic militants even before the killing, was in danger of spinning out of control.

Pentagon officials said Friday they have seen nothing to give them any worries about the state of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

The government said it would hunt down those responsible for her death in the lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border where Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders are thought to be hiding.

"They will definitely be brought to justice," Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said, speaking in the capital, Islamabad.

The government released a transcript Friday of a purported conversation between militant leader Baitullah Mehsud and another militant.

"It was a spectacular job. They were very brave boys who killed her," Mehsud said, according to the transcript. The government did not release an audiotape.

Cheema described Mehsud as an al-Qaida leader who was also behind most other recent terror attacks in Pakistan, including the Karachi bomb blast in October against Bhutto that killed more than 140 people.