Cheers Welcome Bhutto; Her Party May Go to Court : Pakistan: The former prime minister goes home to Karachi, defiant after government is dissolved.

Thousands of cheering supporters greeted ousted Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as she returned to her Karachi home Tuesday from the capital of Islamabad.

“Bhutto will rule again,” chanted about 3,000 activists of her Pakistan People’s Party outside the Karachi airport, which was ringed by hundreds of troops and police.

Supporters danced and clapped as her motorcade left the airport to drive to her seaside home.

Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, already in Karachi, had to climb over a steel gate to greet his wife after airport security refused him entry.

The People’s Party central committee is to meet in Karachi on Friday to decide whether to go to court to challenge President Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s order Monday dismissing Bhutto’s 20-month-old government, dissolving the National Assembly and ordering new elections Oct. 24. He also imposed a state of emergency.

Bhutto left Islamabad defiantly, accusing Ishaq Khan of giving power to her political foes.

“I feel great because I have done a good job,” she told reporters as she left Islamabad for Karachi, her political base and capital of her war-torn home province of Sind.

She called Ishaq Khan’s sudden move a conspiracy to bring her opponents to power through the back door “because they cannot come through the front door.”

U.S. Ambassador Robert Oakley met with Bhutto for 25 minutes and said Washington wants Pakistan’s nascent democracy preserved.

People’s Party activists chanted “Long live Bhutto” as she left for the airport. Some women cried openly.

In a statement, Bhutto appealed for calm and warned the president not to go too far in “arbitrariness.” She said the People’s Party does not want to do anything that could postpone the elections.

Security forces that had ringed Bhutto’s official home since Monday were withdrawn, and officials denied that orders had been issued limiting her movements.

Bhutto’s statement, after a meeting of senior People’s Party figures at her Islamabad home, expressed anger at the “arbitrary, illegal and unconstitutional step taken by the president.”