But she accused militant "sympathizers" in Musharraf's administration of backing the attempt on her life, and Bhutto's supporters chanted, "Killer, Killer, Musharraf!" outside the hospital where she was pronounced dead yesterday.
Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahri decried Bhutto's return in a video message this month and called for attacks on all the candidates in Pakistan's Jan. 8 parliamentary elections, for which Bhutto and her opposition party were campaigning.
Bhutto once said that several Pakistanis arrested in an assassination attempt during her second term in mid-1990s had said they were following Osama bin Laden's orders.
Bhutto, who forcefully pledged to redouble Pakistan's fight against Islamic militancy, was also despised by Taliban-style radicals backed by tribes along the Afghan border.
Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal warlord in the Waziristan region, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper as saying that he would welcome Bhutto's return from exile with suicide bombers. He later denied that in statements to local television and newspaper reporters.
Bhutto also was labeled an infidel by other groups, such as Jaish-ul Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, which were spawned by Pakistan's military and intelligence services to take on neighboring India in the disputed Kashmir region.
The groups later aligned themselves with Al Qaeda and have vowed to battle foreign troops in Afghanistan and wage war against the Pakistani military for its support of the US-led antiterror campaign. Some of their leaders have said Bhutto deserved to die for her threats to crush militants.
"I think by far the most likely [suspect] is the Al Qaeda organization, which has been trying to kill Bhutto for the better part of the decade," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council.
"If it's not them, it's certainly one of the groups that are sympathetic with them," Riedel said. "They all work together and share a common antipathy to Bhutto because she's a woman, an advocate of secularism, a supporter of democracy and everything they stand against."
