Hours before she was assassinated, former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto [Images] spoke to her three children over phone.

Though she was busy with her election campaign in Punjab province throughout Thursday morning, she took out time to speak to her children Bakhtawar (19), Bilawal (17) and Asifa (14).

"There were meetings going on but she spoke to her children as she normally did whenever she was away from home," a close aide of Bhutto told The Post.

Bhutto spoke at length to her youngest daughter Asifa, the aide said.

The 54-year-old two-time Premier died after being shot by the suicide attacker, who subsequently blew himself up near the venue of her election rally in Rawalpindi.

Her husband Asif Ali Zardari and children returned to Pakistan from Dubai late Thursday night and accompanied her body in a special military aircraft from Rawalpindi to her ancestral village in Sindh province.

Bhutto had taken a three-day break from her hectic election campaign in early December to meet her family in Dubai. Though she was to fly to Dubai on December 6, the trip was delayed by a day because of a mix-up over her passport, and that was her last meeting with her children.

Fearing there would be more attempts on her life, Zardari had then asked Bhutto not to go back to Pakistan, especially in view of the suicide attacks on her homecoming rally in Karachi on October 18 that killed nearly 140 people.

"She knew that something like this could happen and she told her husband that she is not afraid," Bhutto's aide recalled.

When he received the news, an inconsolable Zardari initially refused to believe that Bhutto had died. "I don't believe all this. I will believe it only when I see her with my own eyes," he sobbed.

Bhutto married Zardari in 1987 and was very proud of her family. "I am lucky to have a good husband and good children," she told a television channel recently.

Like all mothers, Bhutto doted on her children but also fiercely guarded their privacy. She even put off her return to Pakistan for some years, saying her children needed their mother.

"I love to cook for my children. Although my husband does not like my cooking," she said in one of her last interviews.

Apart from her husband and children, Bhutto took care of her mother Nusrat, who is suffering from Alzheimer's and her apolitical younger sister Sanam.

Bhutto lost her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and two brothers Murtaza and Shahnawaz in equally tragic circumstances.

Two weeks after the October 18 blasts, Bhutto left for Dubai to see her children and ailing mother, but returned home almost immediately after President Pervez Musharraf [Images] declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on November 3.

"My children had heard about the (Karachi) bomb blast through their friends and they were worried. I could not immediately visit them then, so I promised to pay them a visit later," she had said about that visit to Dubai.