The acting Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Mian Soomro, told the cabinet on Friday that Bhutto’s husband Ali Zardari had asked that no autopsy be carried out, but said the authorities had proceeded with one.
The speed with which Bhutto was buried has also been questioned by lawyers calling for an international and neutral investigation.
Her body arrived in her southern hometown, Nau Dero, from the northern city of Rawalpindi before dawn. Muslim custom stipulates burial within 24 hours of death. Her burial at 3pm saw thousands of mourners congregate on paddy fields outside the Bhutto family mausoleum.
The crowds lining Bhutto's final route from Nau Dero to the mausoleum at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh was so heavy that the three-mile procession took an hour. Bhutto’s son, Bilawal, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, helped lift the coffin into the grave beside that of her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the country's first democratically elected leader, who was executed by a military dictatorship.
Many of Bhutto’s supporters wailed and beat their chest and heads in an outpouring of grief.
A deafening roar greeted her coffin, as it was taken towards the Bhutto mausoleum in a white vehicle. It took more than two hours for the funeral cortege to cover the 5 km from her family home in Naudero to the private mausoleum in Ghari Khuda Baksh. The body was brought from Rawalpindi in a plane to Sukkur in southern Sindh province and then flown by helicopter to Naudero.