Pakistan:A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded hotel restaurant in Peshawar yesterday, killing 25 people and leaving a posthumous warning of more attacks to come attached to one of his legs.
The attack came in the course of the bloodiest period of internal strife Pakistan has endured since president Pervez Musharraf came to power in 1999 and represents the latest sign that the military leader's hold is shakier than ever.
The bomber walked into the restaurant in the Marhaba hotel at lunchtime, when the dining room and the narrow streets outside were at their most crowded.
"One side of the hotel was totally demolished," said Jamshed Baghwan, a reporter for Pakistan's Daily Express newspaper.
"There was blood everywhere, like rainwater. I saw 16 bodies. I think one was the son of the owner, about eight- or nine-years-old. There were people taking the wounded in their arms to the hospital that is across the road. The wounded were everywhere."
The authorities said about 50 people were injured. Amid the carnage, according to police, the bomber's legs were recovered.
Scrawled on brown packaging tape wrapped around one of them was a note in Pashto proclaiming: "Those who spy for America will face this same fate."
Sources in Peshawar said the owners of the hotel had originally come from Afghanistan and were seen as outsiders.
In the febrile atmosphere of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic militancy, they had been denounced as spies.
The bombing follows the worst political violence in Pakistan for two decades over the weekend, when 41 people were killed in street gun battles in Karachi between pro-government and opposition parties.
The next day, Karachi and other major cities were brought to a near halt by a protest strike over the role of the pro-government MQM party in the killings.
The opposition Pakistan People's Party also protested yesterday against the killing on Monday of a supreme court official, Syed Hamad Raza, who was to have been a witness in a legal dispute between the government and Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, whom President Musharraf is trying to remove from office. "Raza's murder is a strong message to the judiciary," Sherry Rehman, the party spokeswoman, said. "Pakistan is being ruled by a bunch of butchers."
The fight over Chief Justice Chaudhry's future has crystallised opposition to the Musharraf government.
Yesterday's bomb attack is not thought to be connected, however. Rather it represents the increasing power of Islamic militancy, or "Talibanisation", coming from Afghanistan and the tribal regions along the border.