Draped in the flag of the party she had lived and died for, Benazir Bhutto was buried yesterday alongside her father and two brothers in the white marble mausoleum that she built among the rice paddies and guava groves of her ancestral home.

As the Army was deployed to quell the violent protests that broke out after her assassination at an election rally near the capital Islamabad the day before, about 100,000 of Ms Bhutto’s supporters laid her to rest in Larkana in Sindh province.

It was a ceremony laden with symbolism and tragedy, reflecting her family’s extraordinary role in Pakistan’s 60-year history and the huge political vacuum that she leaves in this chronically unstable country of 165 million people.

Weeping, wailing and beating their heads and chests, supporters of Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) thronged the local airport where her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, arrived with her body on a military transport plane in the early hours.

Q&A: the murder of Benazir Bhutto

Times South Asia Correspondent asks who had most to gain from killing the Pakistan People's Party leader

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BACKGROUND

• Pakistan in chaos as Benazir Bhutto assassinated

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• Obituary: Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007

• Can democracy survive Bhutto killing?

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Surrounded by party activists, friends and ordinary villagers, her simple wooden coffin was driven in a white ambulance from Larkana city, about 300 miles from the southern port of Karachi, to Naudero, the family home where she spent much of her youth.

Dozens of relatives, many of whom flew in from Britain, Dubai and elsewhere yesterday morning, came to the sprawling, British-style mansion to pay their respects in a rare show of unity from a family long riven by personal and political differences.

Among them were her son Bilawal, 19, her daughters Bakhtawar, 17, and Asifa, 14, and her estranged sister-in-law, Ghinwa. Across much of Pakistan prayers were being dedicated to the memory of the woman, educated at Harvard and Oxford Universities, who became the first woman prime minister in the Islamic world aged only 35.

After Friday prayers Mr Zardari emerged from the family home and appealed to the crowds outside to make room for the pall bearers to slide his late wife’s coffin — draped in the green, red and black flag of the PPP — back into the ambulance.

In tears, he then accompanied the closed coffin on the four-mile journey to the mausoleum in the village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, followed by thousands of supporters travelling on foot and by bicycle, motorbike, bus, car, tractor and truck.

On the way, the ambulance passed a railway crossing where a passenger train was still burning after being set alight by rioters enraged by Ms Bhutto’s assassination. It gave an indication of the violence that has engulfed the province since the death of the 54-year-old politician.

As the cortège arrived at the mausoleum, a huge cloud of dust engulfed the waiting crowds and added to the drama. Many of the mourners were perched on the building’s roof.

“Shame on the killer Musharraf, shame on the killer US,” cried some of those outside. Others chanted slogans against the party that supports President Musharraf. “As long as the moon and sun are alive, so is the name of Bhutto.”

Thousands more were crammed inside the mausoleum’s cavernous burial chamber, jostling to see her coffin. An Islamic cleric led prayers and Mr Zardari and Bilawal helped to lower the coffin into the grave.

Some threw petals over the coffin, some wept, and others shouted “Benazir is alive”. One man fainted.

Another sobbed uncontrollably, crying: “My sister has gone.”

Hanif Soomroo, a 38-year-old tour guide who joined the queue to fill the grave with sand, summed up the concerns of many PPP supporters across Pakistan.

“What will happen to the country now? Who will replace her? Just when we hoped things were getting back to normal, our hearts were ripped out,” he said.

Ms Bhutto was laid to rest, as she had always wished, alongside her beloved father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s first populist Prime Minister in 1973, but was deposed in a coup in 1977 and executed two years later.

Ms Bhutto started building the mausoleum in 1994 as a monument to her father’s vision of a secular, democratic Pakistan. Today, it remains unfinished — like his vision — and serves mostly as a testament to his family’s feudal background and its long history of infighting, intrigue and rivalry with Pakistan’s military rulers.

The centrepiece is his marble tomb, where illiterate local farmers often come to pray — even to sacrifice goats — in what critics describe as a throwback to the days when the Bhuttos were the region’s feudal overlords.

On the other side of the three-domed mausoleum lie the brick and concrete tombs of Ms Bhutto’s two brothers, who both died in mysterious circumstances.

Shahnawaz was poisoned at a family holiday home in Cannes in 1985. Mir Murtaza was shot in Karachi in 1996. Murtaza’s widow, Ghinwa, fell out with Ms Bhutto soon after and now leads a splinter faction of the PPP, which opposed her return.

Yesterday, however, there was no mention of family feuds — or of the corruption charges that ended both of Ms Bhutto’s terms as Prime Minister, 1988-1990 and 1993-1996.

Forgotten, too, were her controversial negotiations with President Musharraf, backed by the United States and Britain, which allowed her to return to Pakistan in October.

“It was as if there was a death in the family in every home. People were weeping and cying Motarma Bhutto’s name. They were so charged emotionally,” said Enver Baig, a PPP senator. “When she was building this mausoleum for her father, she never thought she would be in it so soon. But now it is the best place for her.”

In her autobiography, Daughter of the East, published in 1988, Ms Bhutto wrote fondly of her time living in Larkana, even when she was under house arrest. In the book she also compared her family’s misfortunes to the suffering of the Prophet Muhammad.

“The father was not spared. The mother was not spared. The brothers were not spared. The daughter was not spared,” she wrote. “Yet like the followers of the Prophet’s grandson, our resolve never faltered.”

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