Owen Bennett-Jones: "Even if her appeal succeeds, Ms Bhutto's legal problems are not over"

Ms Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), said she would return home next week to appeal against the "politically-motivated" conviction.

She told the BBC: "I plan to go back and I hope that I will be able to keep to my schedule of returning next week."

A Pakistani court on Thursday sentenced both her and her senator husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to five years in prison for receiving kick-backs and commissions from pre-shipment trade inspection contracts to Swiss firm SGS.

The Lahore High Court accountability bench, meeting in Rawalpindi, ruled in a court order that the prosecution had proved its case "beyond any reasonable shadow of doubt", bringing to an end the year-long trial.

Ms Bhutto, Pakistan's first and only female premier, was disqualified from public office. Both she and her husband - who is already in jail on other corruption charges - also received an $8.6m fine.

'Fabricated' charges

The case rested on documents made available by a Swiss investigating magistrate who said that he found evidence that the Bhutto family were the beneficiaries of offshore accounts in which illegal commissions were placed.

Benazir Bhutto: "I have been denied a fair trial"

However Ms Bhutto has always protested her innocence and argues that the charges against her were "fabricated".

"I believe that this order was passed to try and divert international order away from Pakistan's ballistic tests yesterday, and the decision of a British court the day before, fining the Prime Minister's (Nawaz Sharif's) family over $30m," she said.

The former PM said the charges were "politically motivated"

The former Pakistani prime minister said the trial had taken place in a "kangaroo court".

"The people of Pakistan know that these charges are (politically) motivated; that I have been denied a fair trial; that my lawyers were arrested during the course of the trial; that I was not even allowed a single defence witness."

'Mastermind'

But the man behind the government's efforts to secure a guilty verdict, Senator Saifur Rehman, said he was happy with the conviction of the woman he called a "mastermind of corruption".

Senator Rehman said that the Pakistani authorities would seek Ms Bhutto's arrest on her return to the country and they are currently preparing papers so that Interpol could arrest her while she remains abroad.

The UK Home Office said there had been no request so far from Pakistan for any action against Ms Bhutto such as extradition.

The BBC's Islamabad Correspondent Owen Bennett-Jones reports that the legal problems facing Ms Bhutto will not end even if she wins her appeal.

Mr Zardari is already in prison

Thursday's verdict was only the first in a series of trials launched under the Prime Minister Sharif's government into charges of corruption alleging that she and her husband made millions of dollars from corrupt deals and kick-backs during two terms in office.

She was twice elected and twice fired as prime minister on disputed charges of corruption.

However Ms Bhutto has maintained that the Sharif government is on a witchhunt to try to end her career and stifle her opposition to his two-year rule.

Protest

Some 150 members of Ms Bhutto's political party were on Thursday reported to have staged a demonstration in Karachi after the verdict, torching an effigy of Mr Sharif.

The PPP also called a strike in her home province of Sindh for Saturday. Protest rallies were also reported in other towns in southern Sindh, considered a stronghold of the former prime minister.