Via CNN: Benazir Bhutto assassinated

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday outside a large gathering of her supporters where a suicide bomber also killed at least 14, doctors and a spokesman for her party said.

While Bhutto appeared to have died from bullet wounds, it was not immediately clear if she was shot or if her wounds were
caused by bomb shrapnel.

[…]

The attack came just hours after four supporters of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif died when members of another political party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport Thursday, Pakistan police said.

This will send Pakistani politics into a great deal of chaos. There will be accusations from Bhutto’s party that the government was lax in protecting Bhutto, as well as charges that the government was behind the attacks in the first place.

Meanwhile, whenever political parties are shooting at one another, it makes democracy a tad difficult, to say the least.¹

1. Not that Pakistan’s anemic democratic institutions are functioning at the moment. [↩]