Saturday's devastating truck-bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad would have wiped out Pakistan's entire top political and military leadership had not a scheduled dinner there been changed to another venue at the last minute, the interior ministry said Monday. A suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with over half a tonne of explosives into the outer gates of the hotel Saturday, killing at least 53 people and wounding more than 260. “The national assembly speaker had arranged a dinner for the entire leadership, for the president, prime minister and armed services chiefs at the Marriott that day,” interior ministry chief Rehman Malik said. “The president and the prime minister changed the venue to the prime minister's house. The function was not held at the Marriott, thus the whole leadership was saved,” Malik added. A Marriott spokesperson however told BBC that there was no official reservation for such an event but did not rule out the possibility of a reservation made privately. Pakistani investigators on Monday were scrambling to track down an Islamabad-based Al-Qaeda cell believed to have carried out the bombing. The hunt came as British Airways announced that it was suspending all flights to the country amid security fears sparked by Saturday's attack. Investigators believe the attackers constructed the massive 600-kilo (1,300 pound) truck bomb at a safe house in the capital, since all lorries entering the heavily-guarded city are searched at checkpoints. “Carrying 600 kilos of explosives over long distances and through checkpoints is not possible, so our immediate suspicion is that the bomb was loaded in Islamabad,” a senior official involved in the investigation said. Another senior Pakistani security official said the explosives used were “similar to those used in the Danish embassy, which was claimed by Al-Qaeda, and the attack on the ISI camp in Rawalpindi last year.” One of Al-Qaeda's leaders, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, had said that the Danish embassy attack, which killed six people, was “in revenge” for the offensive Danish newspaper caricatures. No group claimed responsibility for the bombing of a bus near a facility of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Rawalpindi in November last year, which killed at least 15 people. __
