PESHAWAR/ISLAMABAD, 16 May 2007 — A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a hotel in Peshawar yesterday, killing 25 people and wounding 30 others. One report put the toll at 27.

The explosion ripped through the crowded Marhaba hotel in front of Mohabat Khan mosque 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.

Senior Superintendent of Police Abdul Majeed Marwat told Arab News on phone from Peshawar it was an act of terrorism.

The attack took place days after a son of slain Taleban military commander Mullah Dadullah was nabbed at the hotel, security officials said.

Militant sources said the attack could be a backlash to the killing of Dadullah.

They declined to say whether the arrest of his son had helped the US military kill Dadullah in an operation in southern Afghanistan over the weekend.

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.

However, a senior investigator said police were examining whether yesterday’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, Sadruddin, had returned from a trip outside with some relatives. Sadruddin, his two sons and two other relatives as well as seven employees were among the dead, he said.

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 was crowded with people eating lunch when the bomb went off. 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.

A source in a leading pro-Taleban group told AFP that tribal militants believed Sadruddin’s sons “were working with Pakistani intelligence agencies and passing on information about the Taleban.”

Sadruddin was also closely linked to the party of Afghan anti-Taleban warlord Abdur Rashid Dostum, whose base is in Mazar-e-Sharif, friends said.

Security was immediately beefed up in Karachi several hundred kilometers further south, where around 40 people were killed in political clashes linked to the suspension of Pakistan’s chief justice, officials said.

In Islamabad, opposition politicians walked out of the National Assembly, forcing the house to postpone a debate on weekend violence in Karachi.