Pakistan has entered 10 days of mourning after burying Nusrat Bhutto, mother of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and a doyenne of the country's tumultuous political establishment.

Thousands of mourners led by President Asif Ali Zardari -- Benazir Bhutto's husband -- turned out for the burial in the family's ancestral town of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh in the Larkana District in Sind province.

Attending the funeral also were her grandson Bilawal Bhutto and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

She was interred beside the grave of her husband, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first democratically elected leader and founder of the Pakistan People's Party. He was hanged in 1979 after a military takeover by General Zia-ul-Haq.

Several Cabinet ministers joined Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto in lowering the body into the grave while police presented an honor guard and played the Last Post, a report by Dawn Newspaper said.

The PPP-led government ordered a 10-day period of national mourning with Monday a public holiday. Government offices, shops, schools and businesses closed across the country for the day.

"The national flag will fly at half mast during these days," Zardari's office said in a statement.

Begum Nusrat Bhutto, 82, died in Dubai after a long illness, her family said.

Her death marks the end of another chapter in the political history of the Bhutto family.

She was born into a wealthy Iranian family that moved to Karachi where in 1951 she married into what would become Pakistan's most famous political dynasty but also scarred by extensive personal tragedies.

The PPP was founded by her husband, who served as president from 1971-73 and prime minister from 1973-77.

Nusrat Bhutto took over as chairman of the PPP when her husband was hanged and remained at its head until her daughter Benazir Bhutto was elected to the National Assembly in 1984.

Benazir Bhutto served as prime minister -- Pakistan's only woman to hold the position -- from 1988-90 and from 1993-96 when her government was dissolved over allegations of corruption. She went into self-exile in Dubai and returned in 2007 but was assassinated in a gun and suicide attack at an election rally for her in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

Benazir Bhutto's husband and Nusrat's son-in-law, Zardari, led the PPP to election victory in February 2008.

Nusrat Bhutto was elected a member of the National Assembly in 1977, 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1997 before she moved to Dubai, Dawn reported.

In 1985 her son Shahnawaz Bhutto, 27, died in Nice, France, in unexplained circumstances.

The Bhutto family believed he was poisoned because of his dedication to groups wanting to overthrow the military regime which had hanged his father.

French police held his wife, Rehana, under suspicion of murder but she eventually was released and left to live in the United States.

State-controlled Pakistani media declared Shahnawaz Bhutto died of drug and alcohol abuse.

Her son, Murtaza Bhutto, was a Harvard- and Oxford-educated politician and a member of Parliament who died, aged 42, after a controversial shootout with police at his residence in 1996.

By the time of Murtaza Bhutto's death Nusrat Bhutto was spending more time with her daughter's family in Dubai and reportedly suffered from cancer and Alzheimer's disease in her later years.