Death toll rises to 24 in Pakistan hotel blast
At least 24 people were killed and 25 wounded when a suicide attacker detonated a bomb that ripped through a crowded Pakistan hotel restaurant in the north-western city of Peshawar today.
The blast deepened instability in Pakistan, still reeling from bloody political riots during the weekend in its commercial capital, Karachi. The attack appeared unrelated to that unrest.
Provincial police chief Sharif Virk said investigators had found the legs of the suspected suicide bomber, with a message taped to one leg that spies for America would meet such a fate.
Peshawar is the capital of North West Frontier Province, a region bordering Afghanistan where pro-Taliban and al Qaida-linked militants are active.
Virk said below the message attached the leg was the word “Khurasan” - a Persian word often used in militant videos to describe Afghanistan.
The bomb went off in the ground-floor restaurant of the four-storey Marhaba Hotel in Peshawar’s old city and left a carnage of bodies and body parts scattered among overturned and broken tables and shattered crockery.
Saeed Khan, a police officer, said that the bomb killed 24 people and wounded 25. The dead included two women and a five-year-old boy who were having lunch, Khan said.
Police initially said the victims of the blast were Pakistanis. But an intelligence official said the hotel was also popular with Afghans and that it had been crowded with people eating lunch.
Police said they had evacuated the hotel, which lies in a busy market area, cordoned off the scene and opened an investigation.
Peshawar has suffered periodic bomb attacks in recent years.
In January, a suicide bombing near a Shiite mosque killed 15 people and wounded more than 30, mostly police.
On April 28, a suicide attack on Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao in the nearby town of Charsadda killed 28 people. Sherpao was slightly hurt in the blast, the latest in a series of top Pakistani officials to be targeted by militants.
Today’s blast will add to a sense of growing instability in Pakistan after a weekend of violence in the southern city of Karachi that left 41 dead. That unrest was linked a political crisis sparked by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of the country’s top judge.
AP
