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Blast kills 25, northwest Pakistan
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A hotel blast in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday left 25 people dead and 30 injured, police said.
A suicide bomb ripped through a crowded hotel restaurant in northwestern Pakistan Tuesday, days after a close relative of slain Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah was nabbed there, security officials said.
The bomb went off in the ground-floor restaurant of the four-story Marhaba Hotel in an old quarter of Peshawar, a city near the Afghan border, leaving a carnage of corpses and body parts scattered among broken tables and shattered crockery.
Investigators found a message taped to one leg of the bomber, saying that spies for America would meet the fate of those killed in the blast, provincial police chief Sharif Virk said. The message also included the Persian word "Khurasan" -- often used in militant videos to describe Afghanistan.
Two security officials told The Associated Press that a close relative of Dadullah had been arrested in the restaurant a few days before Tuesday's attack. The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, refused to be identified.
They declined to say whether the arrest of the relative had helped the U.S. military kill Dadullah in an operation in southern Afghanistan over the weekend -- one of the most senior militant leaders to die since the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001 for hosting al-Qaeda.
Earlier, Javed Iqbal Cheema, a top Pakistani counterterrorism official, told a news conference he did not think the bombing was linked to Dadullah, and denied that Pakistan had provided any intelligence that led to his killing.
"I would only say that Dadullah was killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan did not provide any intelligence on Dadullah," he said in Islamabad.
However, a senior investigator said police were examining whether Tuesday's attack could be linked to events in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions or Afghanistan, including Dadullah's demise.
Hassan Khan, a waiter in the restaurant said the bomb went off soon after the Afghan owner of the restaurant, Saddar Uddin, had returned from a trip outside with some relatives. Uddin, his two sons and two other relatives as well as seven employees were among the dead, he said.
A local intelligence official said Uddin, an ethnic Uzbek, had links to the party of anti-Taliban warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, part of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S. topple the Islamist regime.
Police initially said the victims of the blast were Pakistanis. But the intelligence official said the hotel was also popular with Afghans and that it had been crowded with people eating lunch. The official and the investigator asked that he not be named for security reasons.
Cheema said that 25 people were killed and 30 wounded in the bombing. Saeed Khan, a police officer, said the dead included two women and a 5-year-old boy who were having lunch.
The waiter, Hassan Khan, said he only survived the blast because he was delivering food to guests in their rooms when the bomb went off in the restaurant below.
"I lost my senses, and when I came round and ran to see, there were dead bodies and body parts everywhere, even out in the street," said Khan, whose clothes were stained with blood and soot.
Television footage showed the bloodied bodies of victims on stretchers being bundled into waiting ambulances and then carried chaotically through the crowded corridors of nearby hospitals.
Windows of the hotel front were shattered and fans hanging from the roof were twisted. Windows were also shattered in nearby buildings.
Police said they had evacuated the hotel, which lies in a busy market area, cordoned off the scene and opened an investigation.
Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, 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.
Islamic militants have increasingly asserted themselves in Pakistan's frontier regions, where scores of people have been executed over the past several years apparently for being too closely aligned with the Pakistani government or America -- allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Tuesday'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.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/05/1...t.ap/index.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A hotel blast in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday left 25 people dead and 30 injured, police said.
A suicide bomb ripped through a crowded hotel restaurant in northwestern Pakistan Tuesday, days after a close relative of slain Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah was nabbed there, security officials said.
The bomb went off in the ground-floor restaurant of the four-story Marhaba Hotel in an old quarter of Peshawar, a city near the Afghan border, leaving a carnage of corpses and body parts scattered among broken tables and shattered crockery.
Investigators found a message taped to one leg of the bomber, saying that spies for America would meet the fate of those killed in the blast, provincial police chief Sharif Virk said. The message also included the Persian word "Khurasan" -- often used in militant videos to describe Afghanistan.
Two security officials told The Associated Press that a close relative of Dadullah had been arrested in the restaurant a few days before Tuesday's attack. The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, refused to be identified.
They declined to say whether the arrest of the relative had helped the U.S. military kill Dadullah in an operation in southern Afghanistan over the weekend -- one of the most senior militant leaders to die since the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001 for hosting al-Qaeda.
Earlier, Javed Iqbal Cheema, a top Pakistani counterterrorism official, told a news conference he did not think the bombing was linked to Dadullah, and denied that Pakistan had provided any intelligence that led to his killing.
"I would only say that Dadullah was killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan did not provide any intelligence on Dadullah," he said in Islamabad.
However, a senior investigator said police were examining whether Tuesday's attack could be linked to events in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions or Afghanistan, including Dadullah's demise.
Hassan Khan, a waiter in the restaurant said the bomb went off soon after the Afghan owner of the restaurant, Saddar Uddin, had returned from a trip outside with some relatives. Uddin, his two sons and two other relatives as well as seven employees were among the dead, he said.
A local intelligence official said Uddin, an ethnic Uzbek, had links to the party of anti-Taliban warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, part of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S. topple the Islamist regime.
Police initially said the victims of the blast were Pakistanis. But the intelligence official said the hotel was also popular with Afghans and that it had been crowded with people eating lunch. The official and the investigator asked that he not be named for security reasons.
Cheema said that 25 people were killed and 30 wounded in the bombing. Saeed Khan, a police officer, said the dead included two women and a 5-year-old boy who were having lunch.
The waiter, Hassan Khan, said he only survived the blast because he was delivering food to guests in their rooms when the bomb went off in the restaurant below.
"I lost my senses, and when I came round and ran to see, there were dead bodies and body parts everywhere, even out in the street," said Khan, whose clothes were stained with blood and soot.
Television footage showed the bloodied bodies of victims on stretchers being bundled into waiting ambulances and then carried chaotically through the crowded corridors of nearby hospitals.
Windows of the hotel front were shattered and fans hanging from the roof were twisted. Windows were also shattered in nearby buildings.
Police said they had evacuated the hotel, which lies in a busy market area, cordoned off the scene and opened an investigation.
Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, 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.
Islamic militants have increasingly asserted themselves in Pakistan's frontier regions, where scores of people have been executed over the past several years apparently for being too closely aligned with the Pakistani government or America -- allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Tuesday'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.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/05/1...t.ap/index.html
