Former Pakistani P.M. receives death threat

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto said Tuesday she had received a new death threat but will start campaigning in Pakistani cities in the next couple of days, avoiding mass rallies.

Five days after the suicide bombing that killed at least 136 at her homecoming procession in Karachi, Bhutto said her lawyer received a letter from an unidentified "friend of al-Qaida" threatening to slaughter her "like a goat."

Bhutto said the letter was addressed to her lawyer, Farooq Naik, and had been left for him at the Supreme Court in Islamabad. She said Naik was alerting the chief justice of the threat.

"There are elements who want who to kill us," Bhutto said at her heavily guarded residence in this southern city. "They are petrified that the Pakistan People's Party will return [to power] and that democracy will return."

"They are trying to derail the democratic process because they know if the people are employed and educated the forces of extremism and terrorism will be weakened," she said.

The authenticity of the letter could not be confirmed. Bhutto said the writer claimed to be the "head of the suicide bombers and a friend of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden."