Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad told its staff that Americans might be attacked at a top hotel in the Pakistani capital. The city was already on high alert after a suicide bombing earlier in the week.
In a security alert, the embassy said that the U.S. government knows that “unknown people may be planning to attack Americans at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad sometime during the holidays.” The advisory said that American employees couldn’t go to the popular hotel during the holidays.
The U.S. mission also asked all staff to stay in Islamabad during the holidays and not travel unless they had to.
Two days before the embassy’s order, a suicide bomber killed one police officer and hurt ten others in a residential area of the capital. During a patrol, police stopped a taxi to check it out. That’s when the explosion happened. Police say that a passenger in the back seat set off explosives he was carrying, which blew up the car.
The attack was later blamed on militants from the Pakistani Taliban, who are not part of Afghanistan’s government but work with them.
Since then, the government of Islamabad has put the city on high alert and banned public gatherings and processions, even though campaigns for upcoming local elections are still going on. The police are doing more patrols and have set up checkpoints to check on cars all over the city.
In September 2008, the Marriott Hotel in the capital was the target of a suicide bombing that was one of the deadliest of its kind in the capital. Attackers drove a dump truck up to the hotel’s gates and blew it up, killing 63 people and hurting more than 250 others.
