Bhutto returns to Pakistan
Updated on 18 October 2007
Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto is back home after eight years in self-imposed exile.
After landing, she said: "I've counted the hours, the minutes, the seconds to see this land."
She wept on the runway as she landed in Pakistan and 200,000 supporters lined the streets of Karachi to welcome her.
She is due to hold power sharing talks with President Musharraf but her political future is uncertain.
An amnesty protecting her from corruption charges that allowed her return has been contested by the Supreme Court.
'Pakistan is standing at a very critical juncture. One route leads to democracy, and the other leads to dictatorship,'Benazir Bhutto
Bhutto has vowed to return to end military dictatorship, yet she is coming back as a potential ally for General Musharraf, the army chief who took power in a 1999 coup.
Before departing Bhutto vowed to devote her life to changing the destiny of Pakistan's poor.
"Pakistan is standing at a very critical juncture. One route leads to democracy, and the other leads to dictatorship," Bhutto told journalists at Dubai airport, before saying goodbye to her two daughters and husband, Asif Ali Zardari.
General Musharraf is going through his weakest period, and there is strong speculation he will end up sharing power with Bhutto after national elections due in early January.
Once back in Karachi, Bhutto's procession was expected to take several hours edging through crammed roads to a venue close to the tomb of Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, where a rally has been planned by her party
Muhammad Ali, a 25 year-old office worker from Larkana, a town in Sindh province where the Bhutto feudal home is located, hitched a lift to Karachi to see a leader idolised by his family.
"I have never seen her in real life before. I love Bhutto and her family, and so do all my relatives," Ali said.
Some 20,000 security personnel have been deployed to provide protection against threatened suicide bomb attacks by militants.
