It was early afternoon and the streets had emptied: in cafés and living rooms all faces were turned to the television screens that brought news of the bloodshed in Rawalpindi. When it was clear that she was dead, Pakistani communities across Britain fell to mourning and old fears and divisions came once again to the fore.

In Chaudhry’s restaurant, TKC, in Southall, West London, the staff had served Benazir Bhutto, along with every Pakistani prime minister and president who has visited Britain.

Dalawar Chaudhry, whose father founded the restaurant, told The Times: “She was very warm and accommodating. She really listened to what you had to say.”

He regarded the silent streets. “It’s like a curfew has been imposed. The shoppers have deserted. We’ve had Eid, we’ve had Christmas, we were looking forward to new year, but now this.” His restaurant and nearby cafés had filled as people came to watch the chaotic story unfold.

“The initial reaction was shock,” he said. “We thought it was a bombing, but when it was clear she was dead everyone in the restaurant stood up, eyes fixed on the television screen. Pakistan is on its knees again. Of course, we expected people would try something like this because there is so much at stake. But I can’t work out why more wasn’t done to protect her. Lessons should have been learnt from the other bombings. They spend millions on these elections, yet they didn’t protect her enough.”

In Glodwick, a suburb of Oldham in Greater Manchester, Kashmiri families watched the same news, broadcast by satellite television stations banned in their homeland. It was in these same narrow terrace streets that some of Britain’s worst race riots took place in the summer of 2001, with young Muslim men hurling petrol bombs and bricks at advancing police lines.

The streets have been peaceful since then, but old anxieties seemed not far below the surface yesterday in a febrile atmosphere of grief, recrimination and conspiracy theories.

Divisions in the community emerged, between the supporters of President Musharraf and those who blamed him for the brutal assassination of Ms Bhutto.

Mirza Mohamed Nazir, chairman of the Oldham branch of the British Muslim Welfare Association, heard the news as he worked in his barber shop in Waterloo Street. He believes the murder to be the result of a conspiracy between President Musharraf and malign religious leaders, aiming to snuff out democracy.

“Musharraf is a b*****d,” he said. “He is a friend of the suicide bombers. They killed her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This is a bad day for the future of Pakistan.”

He regarded Ms Bhutto, and her father before her, as the voice of the poor and dispossessed, a force for modernisation.

“Mrs Bhutto talks for the poor, for education, for the health service,” he said. “We hate these suicide bombers. They are animals. They are not Muslims, not human beings.”

Ms Bhutto is thought to have been shot in the neck before being blown up by the suicide bomber. Mr Nazir’s friend, Mohamed Iqbal, thought that this was evidence that Mr Musharraf’s intelligence services were involved.

A short distance up the road Munwar Hussain, 40, runs a busy general store. It had been a very bad day for Pakistan, he said. He would not feel safe there. “We need someone strong like Musharraf,” he added.

Bridging the political divisions was a shared sense of pessismism. Back in Southall, Abdul Gafar, 60, left the television news to go out shopping with his son. “If she had won the election, democracy would have come and the dictatorship of Musharraf would have gone,” he said. “I think we’ll have chaos now. Innocent people will be killed.”

In Punjab Textiles, among rolls of brightly coloured fabrics, Jamin Malik, whose family came to Britain from Lahore 36 years ago, shuffled his charity box, marked “For the poor of Pakistan”. He said: “They warned her that it was dangerous to go. Everyone knew that there were people who wanted to gun her down. Things are going to get a lot worse now.”

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