Supporters surround the ambulance carrying Benazir Bhutto’s body to the graveyard in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh near Larkana. (AP)

Dec. 28: Sounds of grief and outrage filled the dusty air today as Benazir Bhutto, escorted by her weeping husband and children, was laid to rest beside her father in the marble family mausoleum in a south Pakistan village.

Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis sobbed and beat their chests as Asif Ali Zardari and son Bilawal lowered the plain wood coffin draped in the red, green and black flag of Bhutto’s party into the grave at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, about 5km from her ancestral village of Naudero.

A frightening spasm of violence coursed through several Pakistani cities almost at the same time, her furious supporters ransacking banks, burning trains and cars and waging shootouts with police.

“No matter how many Bhuttos you kill, a Bhutto will emerge from each house,” cried a protester among thousands lining the roads and thronging rooftops as the ambulance headed for the mausoleum, passing a burning passenger train on the way.

“Bhutto was my sister, Bhutto was like my mother,” wept Imam Baksh, a farmer, standing on the road. “With her death, the world has ended for us.”

“Shame on the killer Musharraf, shame on the killer US,” another shouted.

As the funeral procession began in the afternoon, Zardari was heard appealing to the supporters massed outside the Bhutto family home to give the pall-bearers room to lift his wife’s coffin into the ambulance.

Their children — Bilawal, 19, Bakhtawar, 17, and Asifa, 14 — stood by weeping as women beat their heads and chests in grief. The children were seen praying with their father at the tomb.

The mourners arrived in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh in Sindh province in tractors, buses, cars and jeeps. Many crammed inside the mausoleum and threw petals on the ambulance.

“As long as the moon and sun are alive, so is the name of Bhutto,” many chanted.

Many were heard venting anger against President Pervez Musharraf and demanding answers as a cleric led the mourners in prayer and hundreds filed in to shovel dirt on the grave.

“General, killer! Army, killer!” one shouted. “I don’t know what will happen to the country now.”

“If it is the work of al Qaida, why is Musharraf still surviving?” Ali Mohammed, an aged Pakistan People’s Party supporter, asked.

Through the day, violence roared through much of Pakistan. A mob in Karachi looted at least three banks and set them on fire, and engaged in a shootout with cops, the police said.

About 7,000 people in Multan ransacked seven banks and a gas station and threw stones at the police, who responded with tear gas. In Islamabad, about 100 protesters burned tyres in a commercial quarter of the city.

Angry mobs burned 10 railway stations and several trains across Sindh, forcing the suspension of services between Karachi and the eastern Punjab province.

Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro said there were no immediate plans to postpone the January 8 elections, despite the growing chaos.

“Right now the elections stand where they were,” he told a news conference. “We will consult all the political parties to take any decision about it.”