Thousands rally as Bhutto party relaunches poll bid

By Faisal Aziz

THATTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - To chants of "Democracy is the best revenge", tens of thousands of Benazir Bhutto's followers rallied in southern Pakistan on Saturday as her party relaunched an election campaign derailed by her assassination.

Around 2,000 police and hundreds of private armed security guards from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) secured the venue, a sports stadium in the town of Thatta in the southern province of Sindh, amid fears Islamist extremists could seek to disrupt the run-up to a Feb. 18 election.

A suspected suicide bomber attacked an election rally for another secular party, the Awami National Party, in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing 14 people and wounding 24.

The PPP rally was the first since Bhutto's Dec. 27 assassination by a suicide bomber in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, adjoining Islamabad, an attack that has stoked fears of instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan and led to a postponement of the vote.

The size of the rally -- police estimated the crowd at over 100,000 -- dwarfed smaller ones Bhutto had held in the run-up to her murder.

"She wanted to change the system and that is why the system has killed her," Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari, de facto party leader, told supporters, some wrapped in red, green and black party flags and wearing hats bearing her portrait.

"The system is her killer, but she knew that even if she lost her life, people like you and me would complete her mission and take revenge," he added.

Giant portraits of Bhutto, Zardari and their 19-year-old son Bilawal, who was appointed party chairman and has vowed to take up his mother's mantle after finishing his studies, hung at the stadium.