Ghulam Murtaza remembers just two things about Saturday evening — the most deafening sound he has ever heard and the complete chaos that followed. The 40-year-old former Pakistan Army soldier works for Karakoram Security Services, which guards the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, and was posted at a side gate when the suicide truck bomber blew up 600 kg of explosives at the main entrance, killing over 50 people and wounding some 250.

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.

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