Similarities emerge in Marriott, Indian Embassy blasts

It may be early days, but bombing of Marriott Hotel bore uncanny similarities to July 7 bombing of Indian Embassy in Kabul.

It may be early days in the investigations into the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel but uncanny similarities are beginning to emerge with the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which killed 54 people including an IFS officer and a Brigadier. Security sources said the two attacks resembled not just in the fact that the explosives-laden vehicles aimed to get past the gates of the two buildings and hit them but blew up because they could not.

The contents of the explosives as well as their origin indicates the same Islamist terror group or closely-linked groups could be responsible for the two devastating attacks, the sources said. Pakistan’s Interior Ministry Adviser Rehman Malik has said that the Marriott truck-bomb contained a mix of 600 kg of RDX and TNT explosives, splinters, mortars, artillery rounds, mines and aluminium powder — a combination that experts say would have probably brought down the building if the truck had managed to ram into it.

The white Toyota Corolla that was used in the Kabul blast carried about 100 kg of RDX and TNT mixture and was also packed with tank shells and mines to maximise the impact of the blast. Within weeks, American intelligence agencies had concluded that members of Pakistan’s ISI had helped plan the attack based on communications intercepts between ISI operatives and Taliban-al Qaeda members suspected to have carried out the bombings. India has since blamed a Pakistani hand in that attack, a charge Islamabad has vehemently denied.

The Indian Express has now learnt that not only were there wire intercepts to justify the allegation but forensic experts of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — the multinational force formed in Afghanistan after the Taliban rulers were forced to quit Kabul following 9/11 — have now traced the explosives used to Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) in Wah city in the north of Pakistan’s Punjab Province.

Although the Marriott probe is yet to zero in on the origin of the explosives, suspicion is growing that it could be from a truck carrying explosives from Wah believed to have been hijacked by al Qaeda some months ago, the sources said. Retired Brigadier Mehmood Khan, a former secretary of Pakistan’s volatile FATA or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas region which borders Afghanistan, had said as much in the regional media, they pointed out.

With al Qaeda, Taliban and other Islamist militant groups splintered and operating separately as well as some of them jointly, more focused investigation is needed to conclusively establish the links between the two blasts and its perpetrators, sources said. But this once again signaled that terror groups in the region continued to enjoy the support or sympathy of rogue elements and extremists in Pakistani agencies, they added.

Incidentally, the Wah munitions complex was itself the target of an attack last month in which about 60 people were killed when two Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up as workers were leaving at the end of their shift. The complex is one of Pakistan’s biggest centres producing conventional arms and ammunition and its products have also been exported to more than two dozen countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq.