The explosion came hours after Zardari, widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, made his first address to Parliament a few hundred metres away, calling for terrorism to be rooted out.

The owner of the hotel, one of two five-star hotels in the capital, said the truck carrying the bomb had been stopped at the front barrier and guards at the gate exchanged fire with the attacker. “Some shots were fired. One of our guards fired back, but in the meantime he detonated all the explosives. All the guards at the gate died,” said owner Sadruddin Hashwani.

As flames engulfed the hotel, which is popular with foreigners including diplomats — the US and British embassies said all their staff were accounted for — and also affluent Pakistanis, police said there were still people trapped inside.

At least one foreigner was killed and about five were wounded, hospital officials said. Up to six Saudi Arabians were missing, the Saudi Ambassador said. A Danish diplomat and three American nationals were among the injured, officials said.

Al Qaeda-linked militants based in hideouts at the Afghan border have launched a bloody campaign of bomb attacks in retaliation for offensives by Pakistan’s security forces in ethnic Pashtun tribal lands on the Afghan border.

The US, frustrated by an intensifying Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, has also stepped up attacks on militants in Pakistan with six missile attacks and a helicopter-borne ground assault this month. The US strikes have angered many Pakistanis.

“This is terrorism and we have to fight it together as a nation,” Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, told reporters at the hospital overflowing with the wounded as rescuers ferried a stream of bloodied bodies from the gutted building.

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