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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3099534.ece
Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader and former Prime Minister, has been killed in a suicide bombing on her political rally today.

Ms Bhutto had been addressing crowds at the garrison city of Rawalpindi, ahead of Pakistan’s general election next month, when the bomber detonated his explosives, killing at least 15 people. She was taken to hospital, but could not be saved.

“At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Ms Bhutto’s party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

“It may have been pellets packed into the suicide bomber’s vest that hit her,” Javed Cheema, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,” referring to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf. Some of them smashed the glass door at the main entrance of the emergency unit, others burst into tears.

Islamic militants have vowed to kill Ms Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan in October. Today’s bombing is the second major attack on her since her return.

A suicide bomber killed nearly 150 people on October 18 as Ms Bhutto paraded through the southern city of Karachi after returning home from eight years in self-imposed exile.

The latest bombing was the second outbreak of political violence in Pakistan today. Earlier, gunmen opened fire on supporters of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from an office of the party that supports President Musharraf, killing four Sharif supporters, police said.

Mr Sharif was several kilometres away from the shooting and was on his way to Rawalpindi after attending a rally.

Ms Bhutto, 54, served twice as Pakistan’s prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She was born on June 21, 1953, into a wealthy landowning family. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and was president and later prime minister of Pakistan from 1971-77.

After gaining degrees in politics at Harvard and Oxford universities, she returned to Pakistan in 1977, just before the military seized power from her father. She inherited the leadership of the PPP after her father’s execution in 1979 under military ruler General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.

First voted in as prime minister in 1988, Bhutto was sacked by the then-president on corruption charges in 1990. She took power again in 1993 after her successor, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign after a row with the president.

Bhutto was no more successful in her second spell as prime minister, and Mr Sharif was back in power by 1996. In 1999, both Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were sentenced to five years in jail and fined $8.6 million on charges of taking bribes from a Swiss company hired to fight customs fraud. A higher court later overturned the conviction as biased.

Ms Bhutto, who had made her husband investment minister during her period in office from 1993 to 1996, was abroad at the time of her conviction and chose not to return to Pakistan.

Mr Sharif meanwhile was deposed by General Pervez Musharraf in a military coup, and went into exile from which he too only returned in the last few weeks.

In 2006 Ms Bhutto joined an Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy with her arch-rival Mr Sharif, but the two disagreed over strategy for dealing with President Musharraf. Ms Bhutto decided it was better to negotiate with him, while Mr Sharif refused to have any dealings with the general.

Benazir Bhutto was not a saint. She left a trail of corruption both during her regime and during her exile.

A decade after she led this impoverished nation from military rule to democracy, Benazir Bhutto is at the heart of a widening corruption inquiry that Pakistani investigators say has traced more than $100 million to foreign bank accounts and properties controlled by Bhutto's family."

"Starting from a cache of Bhutto family documents bought for $1 million from a shadowy intermediary, the investigators have detailed a pattern of secret payments by foreign companies that sought business favors during Bhutto's two terms as Pakistan's prime minister.'

The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement by Bhutto, a Harvard graduate whose rise to power in 1988 made her the first woman to lead a Muslim country. But they trace the pervasive role of her husband, Asif Zardari, who turned his marriage to Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power.

"A worldwide search for properties secretly bought by the Bhutto family is still in its early stages. But the inquiry has so far found that Zardari went on a shopping spree in the mid-1990s, purchasing among other things a $4 million, 355-acre estate south of London. Over eight months in 1994 and 1995, he used a Swiss bank account and an American Express card to buy jewelry worth $660,000 -- including $246,000 at Cartier Inc. and Bulgari Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., in barely a month."