ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top leaders were due to have dinner at Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel on the night it was bombed but cheated death after switching venue at the last minute, a senior official said yesterday.
The hotel however denied the claim, made by Interior Ministry Adviser Rehman Malik, that President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and military top brass had narrowly escaped Saturday’s devastating attack.
A suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with more than half a ton of explosives into the security gates of the luxury hotel, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 260 in a massive fireball.
Malik told reporters that the speaker of the National Assembly had arranged a dinner for Zardari, Gilani and armed services chiefs at the Marriott. “The president and the prime minister changed the venue to the prime minister’s house. The function was not held at the Marriott, thus the whole leadership was saved,” Malik added.
But a spokesman for hotel owner Sadruddin Hashwani said there was no government reservation. “I have checked from the management and the hotel administration, no booking had been made for an official dinner on that day,” spokesman Jamil Khawar told AFP.
An unknown group calling itself “Fedayeen of Islam” claimed responsibility for the bombing in a text message sent to an AFP reporter. There was no way of substantiating the claim and officials said they had not heard of the group.
Malik had on Sunday blamed Al-Qaeda militants and their Taleban allies based in Pakistan’s tribal belt bordering Afghanistan for the attack, and investigators said they were now hunting an Islamabad-based Al-Qaeda cell.
The attackers likely constructed the massive 600-kilo truck bomb at a safe house in the city, as all lorries entering the heavily guarded capital are searched at checkpoints, they said.
“Our focus at the moment is to track down the network in Islamabad which must have facilitated the movement and construction of the bomb,” a senior official involved in the investigation told AFP.
Malik separately told AFP that investigators were examining dramatic video footage of the attack “shot by shot, second by second” for clues, as well as probing who owned the vehicle. The footage showed the attacker failed to get through a barrier when he crashed his six-wheeler truck into the five-star hotel’s security gates, before detonating a small blast that set off the larger explosion minutes later.
Two Americans, the Czech ambassador and a Vietnamese woman were among those killed in the blast.
