Thousands gather for Bhutto remembrance

GARHI KHUDA BAKHSH, Pakistan, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- Mourners gathered Saturday to remember slain former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as officials put the military on alert, observers said.

Bhutto was to be remembered one year after her death by tens of thousands of mourners at her mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh in southern Pakistan, the BBC reported. Prayers, poetry and speeches were expected in ceremonies honoring Bhutto, who was slain in a suicide attack in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Security was a concern for police officials, but efforts were complicated by huge crowds that have thronged into the mausoleum and massed around Bhutto's graveside to touch her tomb, the broadcaster said.

The Pakistan Army has been put on alert and troops have been rotated from the country's western frontier with Afghanistan to parts of the country closer to India, unnamed officials told Dawn, the Pakistani newspaper. They said the moves were a countermeasure to India moving troops towards the border.

The official, however, said troops leaving the western frontier were doing so only because they were in snowbound areas with little fighting against Taliban militants and denied they were being directly deployed on the Indian border, Dawn reported.