Pakistan's Political Family Feud Erupts At Bloody Protest March

NEW DELHI, India - The feud among the Bhuttos, Pakistan's first family, degenerated into bloodshed Wednesday when riot police loyal to Benazir, the prime minister, opened fire with guns and tear gas on a march led by her mother.

Witnesses said at least one young man was killed and four other people were injured in the clash in the town of Larkana, the ruling clan's ancestral home in rural eastern Pakistan.

Nusrat Bhutto, 63, who with hundreds of sympathizers wanted to visit the tomb of her husband, passed out after inhaling some of the acrid gas but was not seriously hurt, witnesses said.

Both Bhutto women came to Larkana, 300 miles north of Karachi, to pay their respects on the 66th anniversary of the birth of Nusrat's husband, the late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

"The day of celebration has been turned into a day of mourning," the estranged mother of Pakistan's prime minister told reporters. `I am very sad, I am very perturbed. This is not democracy; this is a police state."

An official with the Sind provincial government claimed that police fired only when the crowd, which carried clubs and sticks, captured a policeman and pummeled him.

For seven years, the mercurial and charismatic Bhutto ruled Pakistan. But he was toppled by the army in 1977 and hanged two years later. In the past several months, Bhutto's widow and his 40-year-old daughter have become rivals for the legacy and political machine left by Bhutto. Benazir's younger brother Murtaza has taken his mother's side.

The people fired on by police were marching in support of Nusrat Bhutto and Murtaza, 39, who is in jail on terrorism charges but is being touted by his mother as the legitimate leader of the Pakistan People's Party.