Benazir Bhutto was buried at her ancestral village in southern Pakistan this evening as riots that began after her assassination yesterday continued across the country, leaving 23 people dead, including four security officers.

The government laid the blame for the combined shooting and suicide bomb attack on an al-Qaeda linked militant, and ordered the army deployed to Bhutto’s home province of Sindh, where the worst violence occurred, including in parts of the city of Karachi, as protests descended into criminality and banks were ransacked, train carriages and cars set on fire, and shops looted and burned.

The government ordered an almost complete shutdown of services to try to prevent the violence from spreading. Officials suspended train services between Karachi and the Punjab province to the east, and most internal flights were cancelled. Gas stations across the country were closed, making it virtually impossible to make a journey by car any great distance. Roads were closed around the city centres where trouble was anticipated and television and Internet services were down or only sporadic in most cities.

With many Bhutto supporters openly blaming the government for the assassination, the Interior Ministry made the surprising announcement that Bhutto had died not from gunshots or shrapnel but from a skull fracture when she was thrown by the force of the suicide attack and hit her head on a lever of the car sun roof.

Two high-level inquiries are being conducted into her death, one headed by the senior judiciary and one by high level police and intelligence officials, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, said.

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