Pakistan:Two explosions hit former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto's convoy yesterday, killing up to 89 people as she returned to Pakistan from eight years in self-imposed exile.
Television channels said Ms Bhutto was safe and had left the truck that had been transporting her through roads thronged by hundreds of thousands of people in Karachi, Pakistan's most violent city.
Militants linked to al-Qaeda, angered by Ms Bhutto's support for the US "war on terror", had threatened to assassinate her.
Dr Ejaz Ahmed, a police surgeon, said 56 dead had been brought to three hospitals in the city. A reporter counted 33 bodies in another hospital. There were at least two dozen wounded admitted to Jinnah hospital. One report also spoke of shots having been fired at the vehicle in which Ms Bhutto was travelling.
Some 20,000 security personnel had been deployed to provide protection. But intelligence reports suggested at least three jihadi groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban were plotting suicide attacks, according to a provincial official.
Ms Bhutto had returned to lead her Pakistan People's Party in national elections meant to return the country to civilian rule.
For years Ms Bhutto had vowed to return to Pakistan to end military dictatorship, yet she came back as a potential ally for President Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who took power in a 1999 coup.
The United States is believed to have quietly encouraged their alliance to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan pro-western, committed to fighting al-Qaeda and supporting Nato's efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.
Dressed in a green kameez, a loose tunic, her head covered by a white scarf, Ms Bhutto had earlier stood in plain view on top of her truck, ignoring police advice to stay behind its bullet proof glass, as it edged through crowds waving the red, black and green tricolour of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP).
Billboards along the route bore giant images of BB, as she is known, and her late father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the country's first popularly elected prime minister, who was ousted and executed by his army chief, Gen Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.
"Now that the people have given their verdict, it is necessary that the elections should be free and fair," she said before setting off at the head of a procession into Karachi.
While the rest of Pakistan was transfixed by Ms Bhutto's homecoming, Gen Musharraf spent most of the day at his army office in Rawalpindi, with no official engagements, an aide said.
Ms Bhutto's return pleased investors in the Karachi Stock Exchange, whose main index has risen 47 per cent this year.
Gen Musharraf has already granted an amnesty to protect Ms Bhutto from corruption charges brought by the government of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister he overthrew and later exiled.
But the Supreme Court is hearing challenges to the legality of the amnesty. It is also hearing challenges to the president's right to have stood for re-election while still army chief in a ballot he won easily on October 6th.
- (Reuters)