( AP ) - A suicide attacker with an ominous warning to spies for America taped to his leg detonated a bomb that ripped through a crowded hotel restaurant near the Afghan border Tuesday, killing at least 24 people, police said.
The explosion deepened instability in a country still reeling from deadly political riots over the weekend in its commercial capital, Karachi. The attack appeared unrelated to that unrest, but rather the work of an Islamic militant.
Provincial police chief Sharif Virk said the message taped to the severed leg of the bomber said spies for America would meet the same fate as those killed and included the Persian word "Khurasan" - often used in militant videos to describe Afghanistan.
The owner of the restaurant, who was killed in the bombing, was an Afghan with ties to an anti-Taliban warlord, and the restaurant itself was popular with many Afghans.
Peshawar is the capital of North West Frontier Province, a region bordering Afghanistan where pro-Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants are active.
A senior investigator said police were examining whether the attack could be linked to events in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions or Afghanistan, including the weekend death of the top Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah in a U.S.-led military operation in southern Afghanistan.
Hassan Khan, a waiter in the ground-floor restaurant, said he survived only because he was delivering food to guests in their rooms when the blast occurred.
"I lost my senses, and when I came round and ran to see, there were dead bodies and body parts everywhere, even out in the street," said Khan, whose clothes were stained with blood and soot.
He said the bomb went off soon after the Afghan owner of the restaurant, Saddar Uddin, had returned from a trip outside with some relatives. Uddin, his two sons and two other relatives as well as seven employees were among the dead, he said.
An intelligence official said Uddin, an ethnic Uzbek, had links to the party of the anti-Taliban warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, part of the Northern Alliance that toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan with U.S. support in late 2001.
Like the investigator, the intelligence official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to journalists.
Windows of the hotel front were shattered and fans hanging from the roof were twisted. Windows were also shattered in nearby buildings. Television footage showed the bloodied bodies of victims on stretchers being bundled into waiting ambulances and then carried chaotically through the crowded corridors of nearby hospitals.
Tariq Khan, a 35-year-old jeweler with a shop on the same street, said the explosion left him in shock for several minutes.
"Then I saw dust and smoke everywhere," Khan said. "People who were injured were crying and wailing."
Peshawar has suffered periodic bomb attacks in recent years.
In January, a suicide bombing near a Shiite mosque killed 15 people and wounded more than 30, mostly police.
On April 28, a suicide attack on Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao in the nearby town of Charsadda killed 28 people. Sherpao was slightly hurt in the blast, the latest in a series of top Pakistani officials to be targeted by militants.
Islamic militants have increasingly asserted themselves in Pakistan's frontier regions, where scores of people have been executed over the past two or three years apparently for being too aligned with the Pakistani government or America - allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.