"Bhutto's killing threatens Pakistan with political chaos," said the front-page headline in the International Herald Tribune.

The killing of the former premier, who had staged a political comeback after returning from exile to fight in elections next month "is a disaster for a country that is already flirting with state failure," said the Financial Times, the British business daily.

The "violent death leaves a hole in national politics and adds a vicious extra dimension of disintegration to a country that is already falling apart after decades of civilian and military misrule," it said in an editorial.

Italy's Corriere della Sera said "Pakistan is becoming an ever bigger atomic time bomb" and highlighted fears that the military could take back power after the death of Bhutto, who was killed by a suicide bomber on Thursday.

Jordanian newspaper Al Dustour said "Bhutto's assassination is a terrible act that paves the way for a civil war in Pakistan, the country was already facing a difficult time because of religious, ethnic and political reasons."

"All indications show that Pakistan will go into a dark and a difficult stage."

The Times of London said Pakistan was now in "The Nightmare Scenario". An editorial in the newspaper said the West had always believed that the killing of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf was "'the Nightmare Scenario' for international order."

"In a subtle recognition of the way in which power had already evolved in Pakistan, even before a vote had been cast, the demise of Ms Bhutto had become the possibility the outside world had most dreaded," The Times commented.

Leading US newspapers urged President George W. Bush to reassess his unconditional backing of Musharraf, a key ally in the US "war on terror".

"American policy must now be directed at building a strong democracy in Pakistan that has the respect and the support of its own citizens and the will and the means to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban," said a New York Times editorial.

"The days of Washington mortgaging its interests there to one or two individuals must finally come to an end."

The Washington Post said "elections held -- on January 8 or soon afterward -- and a restored democracy remain the best way for the centrist majority in Pakistan to rally against the forces of extremism that yesterday realized a great, though despicable, victory."

In Germany, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said the murder of Bhutto "shows in a terrible way the state Pakistan is in and how far it is from even a halfway stable situation."

The Slovak daily SME said that Pakistan has lost probably the most important woman in the Islamic world and Musharaff is now under huge pressure.

"On the one side he (Musharaff) unsuccessfully fights the Islamists who are likely to have murdered the moderate Bhutto, but on the other hand he brutally suppresses his democratic opponents."

Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest newspaper, said the killing proved that Pakistan's elections "cannot go ahead in a free and equitable" fashion.

France's Liberation newspaper said that Pakistan's six decades of history had been "punctuated by these spasms of extreme violence that spares no people, no religion, no political party in this tragic and torn country.

"Now the murder of Benazir appears as a dramatic escalation which threatens even the existence of this state still struggling to find its identity and stability 60 years after its creation."

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