A bombing outside the Danish Embassy suggests Al-Qaeda's brand of Islamic militancy is still active in Pakistan, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad Ten weeks of relative calm was shattered on 2 June when a car bomb exploded outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. Eight people were killed, and 25 wounded. The overarching fear of the capital's residents -- local and foreign alike -- was whether the blast heralded a return to the carnage earlier this year when suicide attacks were ripping through Pakistan's cities on an Iraqi scale. The safe answer is no. For this was an attack most knew would happen. Nestled in a tree-lined avenue of glades and whitewashed homes, in the last two months the Danish Embassy had become a fortress, ever since Osama bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahri called on their followers to wreak violence on a country that was once more publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, caricatures many Muslims found blasphemous and Al-Qaeda has used to support its cause. On 2 June the fortress became victim to the attacker. At around noon a white Toyota car drew up alongside the embassy's metal reinforced gate. It's not clear whether the driver then abandoned or stayed in the vehicle. What is clear is that the blast was so severe that it blew down the compound's outer wall and seared leaves from the trees. A crater a metre deep marked the place where the car had parked. Its engine, probably housing the bomb, was a smoldering carcass, thrown 50 metres away on a grass verge. All the slain were Pakistanis, including two security guards. Those wounded were mostly employees from the United Nations-sponsored Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE). Its offices were across the road from the embassy. After the blast it looked like a multiple pile-up of charred, twisted cars, with the roof collapsed on itself like in an earthquake. Anjum Masoud is filed operations manager for the DTCE: "I was sitting at my desk when the office shook with an almighty explosion," he said. "My friend at the next desk said it was a bomb. We evacuated everyone we could find. Six or seven of our staff were injured. A cleaner was killed. He was sweeping the road when the car drew up. A hundred people work here. Fortunately it was lunchtime, so many were away from the office. Otherwise many, many more would have been killed." Anjum was shaken. He was also angry. "We voiced our concern many times about being so close to the Danish Embassy. We asked for it to be moved. We said if it's under threat then so are we. And it's not our business to be involved in all this." The embassy has been under threat since 2005, when the cartoons were first published in the Danish press. In 2006 mass, violent demonstrations shook the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar in protest at the caricatures. Islamist parties called for the embassy to be closed and the ambassador expelled. In 2007 he was called back to Copenhagen. He has yet to be replaced. The embassy runs on a skeleton staff. Security was ratcheted up further in March following the statements by Bin Laden and El-Zawahri. Danish embassies in Afghanistan and Algeria were removed to secret locations after specific threats were received. In Pakistan there were also threats against the Dutch Embassy because of Fitna, a Dutch film that portrays the Prophet Mohamed as a terrorist and Islam as a kind of permanent global jihad. All Dutch diplomats were moved to a hotel for their safety. But the Danish Embassy stayed put in its residential nest. Security was deemed sufficient. Security was certainly pervasive. There were checkpoints closing all three roads to the embassy. After the blast, dozens of police and black-shirted "anti-terror squad" personnel combed the area, now carpeted by smashed glass, broken masonry and charred furniture. Plainclothes intelligence men, local and foreign, spoke hurriedly into walkie-talkies. I asked one, an American, if he had witnessed the bomb. "No," he answered, "I'm not here." But if security was so tight how could the car get so close? Hamid Ali Khan, chief commissioner of police in Islamabad, gave the simplest of answers. "The car had red diplomatic number plates used by the Danish Embassy. That's why the police waved it through," he said. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing. Denmark has 550 troops stationed in Afghanistan as part of NATO so the attackers may have been the Taliban: its Pakistani offshoots were behind many suicide bombings in the last year and car bombs have been used by them before. But the Taliban has also been observing a ceasefire with the government and on 2 June disowned all knowledge of the attack. "I cannot say who's responsible for this", said Pakistan Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar. So suspicion rests with Al-Qaeda or Pakistani jihadi groups allied with it. The bombing comes a few days after CIA chief, Michael Hayden, said Al-Qaeda had suffered serious setbacks and was facing "near strategic defeat" in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. That maybe so in Iraq and Saudi Arabia but it doesn't feel like near strategic defeat in Islamabad.
