Vivid eyewitness accounts are continuing to circulate about exactly how Benazir Bhutto was killed as she left a campaign rally in Rawalpindi on Thursday.

Even as Pakistan buries assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto today, mourning Pakistanis are beginning to think about what comes next for their beleaguered nation. Bhutto supporters vented their anger late into Thursday night, burning shops, police stations and buses in Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi, the site of yesterday's suicide attack. Rioting continued on Friday. "It has released bottled up national energies," says lieutenant general Hameed Gul, the former director general of Pakistan's intelligence organization, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). "[The assassination] is going to really excite the people, bring them out. Which direction this energy takes, that's the question."

"Bhutto martyred, God save Pakistan," the headline of a news article in the National Herald Tribune, a newspaper published in Pakistan's Punjab region, intones.

Benazir Bhutto was a beautiful and idealistic woman when she came to Pakistan's rescue in 1988. Growing up as the scion of one of its most powerful political families imposed enormous responsibilities on her and created perhaps unrealistic expectations of what she could deliver to save her chaotic country from disintegration.

Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was reared amid the privileges of Pakistan’s aristocracy and the ordeals of its turbulent politics. Smart, ambitious and resilient, she endured her father’s execution and her own imprisonment at the hands of a military dictator to become the country’s — and the Muslim world’s — first female leader.

The ostentatious white-domed mausoleum where Benazir Bhutto was to be buried alongside her father bears grim witness to the bloody story of one of Pakistan's pre-eminent political families.

Journalist and author Shuja Nawaz, who knew both Benazir Bhutto and her father, discusses the impact the assassination will have on Pakistan's stability.

She, the brave and devoted daughter battling to save her father from the gallows of Pakistan's military rulers. Me, "a special friend with whom we shared so much through those times of tragedy and triumph", as she wrote in my copy of her biography.

Pakistan's interior ministry said Friday that Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her vehicle's sunroof when she tried to duck after a suicide attack, and that no bullet or shrapnel was found in her.

A Taliban commander linked to al- Qaeda is suspected of plotting the suicide bombing that killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's government said.

The body of Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest in her ancestral village, as violence erupted in cities across Pakistan on Friday, a day after the former prime minister was assassinated at an election campaign rally.

Pakistan’s assassinated former premier Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest in her family’s ancestral grave Friday to scenes of searing emotion from hundreds of thousands of mourners. State television said Bhutto was buried at the mauseoleum after a mullah led the massive crowd in funeral prayers.

Try to imagine a young Pakistani woman bounding into the newsroom of the Harvard Crimson in the early 1970s and banging out stories about college sports teams with the passion of a cub reporter. That was the first glimpse some of us had of Benazir Bhutto.

Benazir Bhutto - world and readers' reactions

Benazir Bhutto was the target of threats from virtually all of the militant groups who make Pakistan their home, from Al-Qaida to homegrown terrorists to tribal insurgents on the Afghan border.

When I said goodbye to Benazir Bhutto two months ago just after she had survived a bomb attack she said she would "catch me later".

Benazir Bhutto was born in Karachi, Pakistan in a prominent political family. At age 16 she left her homeland to study at Harvard's Radcliffe College.

When word came of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday, the news had special meaning for "Today" co-host Ann Curry.

Two months before her death, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sent an e-mail to her U.S. adviser and longtime friend, saying that if she were killed, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would bear some of the blame.