At least 60 are dead and 240 injured in what police are saying was a suicide truck bomb detonated at a Marriott hotel in Islamabad.
The Czech ambassador to Pakistan was also pulled from wreckage, and was pronounced dead.
Pakistani police said the blast went off around 8 p.m., just hours after Pakistan’s new president-elect Asif Ali Zardari told government officials he planned to “root out terrorism.”
The Islamabad Marriott is a five-story hotel with 258 rooms.‚ The blast caused a natural gas leak which allowed the fire to spread quickly through the hotel, soon engulfing the entire structure in a pit of flames and wreckage.
The blast shattered windows up to two miles away.
Most of the dead were in their cars outside the hotel waiting for passengers.
The death toll will certainly rise in the near future.‚ Just like the bombings in India just weeks ago, in this situation only the radicalists that perpetrate the violence can justify their actions.‚ The Marriott has been the focus of many a hotel bombings in the middle-east, perhaps because it is an American hotel chain.
No one has yet been arrested in connection to the bombings, there are no suspects as of yet and no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The video shows footage of the blast, courtesy of BBC.
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