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.

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