Warning found on severed leg

A Pakistani counterterrorism official denied that Pakistan had helped find Dadullah.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- The suicide bomber's severed leg, found in the rubble of a restaurant where he killed 25 people, was wrapped with brown tape used to seal packages. On the tape, scrawled in the Pashto language, was an ominous warning.
"Those who spy for America will face this same fate," it said.
The bomb went off Tuesday in the four-story Marhaba Hotel in an old quarter of this frontier city, which served as the main staging point for mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s and is still synonymous with violent Islamic radicalism and political intrigue.
Security officials indicated the bombing could be retaliation for the weekend killing of Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's military chief in nearby Afghanistan -- a further sign that the war between Islamic militants and NATO forces was spilling across the border.
The lunchtime blast devastated the ground-floor restaurant, leaving a carnage of corpses and body parts scattered among broken tables and shattered crockery.
In addition to the warning for those who spy for the United States, the parcel tape bore the Persian word "Khurasan" -- often used in militant videos to describe Afghanistan, said provincial police chief Sharif Virk.
What's surmised
Two security officials told The Associated Press that a close relative of Dadullah was arrested in the restaurant a few days ago. The officials requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
They declined to identify the relative or say whether the arrest helped the U.S. military kill Dadullah in Afghanistan over the weekend. He was one of the most senior militant leaders to die since the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001.
Javed Iqbal Cheema, a top Pakistani counterterrorism official, told reporters he did not think Tuesday's bombing was linked to Dadullah, and denied that Pakistan had provided any intelligence that led to his killing.
"I would only say that Dadullah was killed in Afghanistan, and Pakistan did not provide any intelligence on Dadullah," he said in Islamabad.
Still, a senior investigator said police were examining whether the attack could be linked to events in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions or Afghanistan, including Dadullah's demise.
Who was murdered
The bomb went off shortly after the restaurant's Afghan owner, Saddar Uddin, returned from a trip outside with some relatives, said waiter Hassan Khan. Uddin, his two sons, two other relatives and seven employees were among the dead, he added.
A local intelligence official said Uddin, an ethnic Uzbek, had links to the party of anti-Taliban warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, part of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S. topple the old regime.
The hotel also was popular with Afghans and had been crowded with people eating lunch, according to the intelligence official. Both the official and the investigator asked that they not be identified for security reasons.
Cheema said that 25 people were killed and 30 wounded in the bombing. Among the dead were two women and a 5-year-old boy, said police officer Saeed Khan.
The waiter, Hassan Khan, said he survived the blast because he was delivering food to guests in their rooms when the bomb went off in the restaurant below.
"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.
Television video showed the bloodied bodies of victims on stretchers being bundled into ambulances and carried through crowded hospital corridors. The hotel's windows were shattered, as were those in nearby buildings.
Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier province, has an enduring reputation as a hub for armed militants and a spy-infested nest of political intrigue.
Link to bin Laden
Drawn by the anti-Soviet jihad, Osama bin Laden was based here for several years when he helped recruit and finance a multinational force to fight inside Afghanistan; it would later spawn his al-Qaida network.
After the Taliban regime was ousted, its remnants fled into Pakistan. Leaders of the militia were widely suspected of hiding in cities including Peshawar, just an hour's drive through the Khyber Pass to the Afghan border.
The city is still home to hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, many sharing the Pashtun ethnicity of their Pakistani brethren.
Located close to militant strongholds in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal areas and the scene also of sectarian tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the city has suffered regular bomb attacks.
In January, a suicide blast near a Shiite mosque killed 15 people and wounded more than 30, mostly police. On April 28, a suicide attack on Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao in the nearby town of Charsadda killed 28 people. Sherpao was slightly hurt.
The frontier region, viewed as a likely hiding place for bin Laden, has seen scores of targeted killings with a grisly link to Tuesday's attack -- notes attached to many of the victims, some of them beheaded, denouncing them as American spies.
Analysts say those killed -- including clerics and tribal elders -- reflect how militants deal with anyone too closely aligned with the United States or its Pakistani allies in the war on terrorism.
The Bush administration has backed President Gen. Pervez Musharraf as a bulwark against Islamic radicals.
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