The journey of assassinated Pakistani ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's body to its grave has begun in a simple wooden coffin, carried out of a Rawalpindi hospital.

Supporters of the dead opposition leader could be seen clinging to each other, weeping, at the hospital.

The coffin was loaded into an ambulance to be taken to a plane for the journey south to Larkana in Ms Bhutto's ancestral province of Sindh.

The Bhutto family's ancestral graveyard in Ghari Khuda Baksh, Larkana, is dominated by the mausoleum of Benazir's father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

An attendant stands beside the Garhi Khuda Bux, or Bhutto family burial tomb, in this image from October 2007 when Benazir made a pilgrimage to the mausoleum.

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