In an age when cellphones, e-mail and satellite TV have bridged the isolating distance for immigrants, seismic events, like Bhutto’s death across the planet in Rawalpindi, reverberate in the city’s Pakistani enclaves sometimes within minutes.

Most are paying more attention to the Pakistani election than to the American presidential primaries, said Madhulika Khandelwal, director of the Asian/American center at Queens College.

While Bhutto was not universally admired, Pakistanis were angry that she was taken from the political scene by an assassin’s bullet. “When a leader dies, you find the real value of that leader, and that is happening right now,” said Asif Alam, president of the New York-based Association of Pakistani Professionals. “A lot of people who didn’t support her are appreciating that she gave her life for a democratic and politically stable Pakistan.”

Bhutto, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, was a favorite of Western leaders, so the news unsettled not just Pakistanis.

“Hers was a voice for democracy, and the silencing of it by such brutal means is a shock to us all,” said Mayor Michael R Bloomberg.

Pakistanis began coming to New York in significant number as a result of immigration laws during the mid-1960s and later that greatly expanded quotas for countries that until then had scarcely formed part of the American patchwork.

The city’s Pakistani population more than doubled from 1990 to 2000, according to a study of 2000 census data by the Asian American Federation of New York.

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