About 35 percent of the city’s 50,000 Pakistanis are naturalized citizens. Although many work as engineers and staff the city’s hospitals, 28 percent of the city’s Pakistanis lived below the poverty line. The city’s Department of Planning says that if illegal immigrants were counted, the Pakistani population could approach 70,000.

Along Coney Island Avenue on Thursday, there were those who did not know whether to believe early rumors that Bhutto had been attacked and sought out fellow immigrants for confirmation. At a community center on Coney Island Avenue that helps South Asian immigrants, a woman wearing a black headscarf leaned against a door frame, numb, she said, from the news. “She was a mother, she had children,” said the woman, who declined to give her name because her culture frowns upon women conversing with unfamiliar men, she said.