Pakistan's parliamentary elections will be delayed for six weeks until February 18th, officials announced today.
The country's Electoral Commission said the delay was necessary because of the violence and chaos that followed the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.
The elections had been scheduled for January 8th, but Qazi Mohammed Farooq, head of the Commission, said it would be impossible to hold the polls on that day.
The commission has said many of its offices in Sindh, Ms Bhutto's home province, were burnt in the rioting that followed her murder last week and election material, including voter rolls, were reduced to ashes.
The Pakistan Muslim League, which backs President Pervez Musharraf, has said it has no objection to postponing the vote because of security concerns.
Supporters of Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP),and the other main opposition party, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, wanted the election to go ahead as planned, fearing a delay would work to Mr Musharraf's advantage.
Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, the new co-chairman of the PPP alongside their 19-year-old son Bilawal, has called a party meeting at the family home in southern Sindh province later in the day.
President Pervez Musharraf, in a televised address to the nation, said army and paramilitary troops would deal forcefully with any renewed violence and appealed for national reconciliation leading to free and fair elections.
"This is time for national reconciliation and not confrontation," he said.
Pakistan has been under pressure from the United States and elsewhere, as well as the PPP to accept an outside investigation. Forensic experts believe that much of the evidence has been lost in the clean-up operation after the gun-and-bomb attack that killed Ms Bhutto in Rawalpindi last Thursday as she left a rally.
Deep scepticism among ordinary Pakistanis over the conduct of the investigation was exacerbated by the Interior Ministry's assertion that Ms Bhutto was killed when she smashed her head against a sunroof lever. But her aides said they saw the bullet wounds and television images showed a gunman firing from close range.
Authorities today published photographs of a severed human head and two men standing in a crowd moments before Ms Bhutto was killed and offered a reward for their identification.
While the government has made al-Qaeda and its Pakistani cohorts its prime suspects, the country is awash with conspiracy theories suggesting Ms Bhutto could have been killed by political enemies with friends in the intelligence agencies.
Nearly 60 people died in the post-assassination violence and, while the situation has now calmed, it remains tense and markets are gripped by fears of capital flight if security worsens. Share prices fell 3 per cent yesterday.
Meanwhile, Pakistani security forces have killed up to 25 al-Qaeda-linked militants in fighting in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border that began yesterday.
"The fighting erupted after miscreants abducted our four paramilitary troops. We killed five miscreants yesterday and 15 to 20 in overnight fighting," military spokesman Major-General Waheed Arshad said today.