Three days on, the ethnic Kashmiri is back at work, a slight limp in one leg caused by falling debris — the only physical sign of that dreadful evening. “Allah saved me,” he says, looking skyward. “But 35-40 of my colleagues were not as lucky. It’s sad and a bit scary.”

As a post mortem of one of Pakistan’s deadliest terror attacks began, investigators grilled Murtaza and other survivors like him on how the truck managed to get so close to the hotel. “It came from the main road on the other side of the hotel. I wouldn’t know who they were trying to target but it was poor people like us who got killed,” he says.

Czech Ambassador to Pakistan Ivo Zdarek, the most high-profile of the four foreign victims of the Marriott attack, had a longstanding Indian friend in Islamabad and had visited his house for dinner only 10 days ago. India’s Deputy High Commissioner to Pakistan, Manpreet Vohra, and the 47-year-old Zdarek, a father of two, have been friends for the last 15 years since both were posted in Shanghai.

While Vohra has been serving in Islamabad for over a year-and-a-half, Zdarek arrived only last month and was living in the Marriott. “He was quite cheerful,” Vohra told The Indian Express, recalling the dinner at his home. “He was looking for a house and a cook. This is tragic.” On Tuesday, the Indian High Commission cancelled an Iftar reception it was hosting on September 25 as a mark of respect for those killed and wounded in the attack.

Investigations into the attack have made little progress even as a little-known Islamic group called the Fidayeen Islam claimed responsibility late Monday night. But at ‘Ground Zero’ — the name in some sections of the Pakistani media for the site of what has been called the country’s own 9/11 — progress seems to be the key as dozens of workers busy themselves in clearing the debris and repairing the building, which was the only legal watering hole for foreigners in the Pakistani capital.

With Sadruddin Hashwani, the owner of the hotel, saying he aimed to resume operations in four months, there is little time to lose, says one supervisor. Dumpers, cranes and tractors work to clear debris and level the ground outside while workers carry shattered, damaged and burnt property from inside and even pull out decorative plants and small trees that lined the compound.

More than a dozen cars, most of them wrecked beyond repair, are neatly lined one behind the other on the opposite lane. Painters got down to work on Monday itself and began coating the burnt and soot-covered decorative cement frames that formed the front facade of the squat building.

A handful of foreigners, private security consultants and emergency evacuation experts, discreetly survey the building from a distance and take pictures for their files. “This reminds me of any of those huge buildings in Kabul bombed during the war,” one of them says, speaking on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to speak to the media. The Islamabad Marriott, he says, was one of the best guarded hotels in this part of the world as it had been targeted at least twice earlier in recent years.

It had a large team of guards and every vehicle was searched thoroughly, including the underside through a hi-tech scanning system. Roadblockers could stop a vehicle weighing about 10-12 tons and closed circuit TV cameras captured the number plate and the driver’s face while records of those entering were preserved for a month. “The system worked and the truck could not get inside and most of those killed are security guards,” said the expert. “Otherwise the death toll would have been much much worse.”