Islamabad weeps
Posted: Sunday, September 21, 2008 10:33 AM by Ian Sager
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Notes from the field
By Ann Curry, NBC News anchor
After covering last night's massive suicide bombing at Islamabad's Marriott Hotel, I am haunted by what we saw and heard.
On the scene, as the hotel was engulfed in flames with hundreds of people still 
inside, the wail of the ambulances and fire trucks was too distant, given the intensity of the disaster. As the fire roared red and out of control, with some flames a gas-fed blue, we could see people struggling to climb to safety.
Later, officials would estimate the temperatures inside the hotel reached 650 degrees farhenheit.
We stumbled up large pieces of rubble, and reaching the top, we found ourselves peering over the edge of the blast crater. It has been dug 30 feet deep, and more than 50 feet wide by what investigators estimated was one ton of explosives.
At the bottom of it, a Pakistani policeman was gathering evidence. Men in traditional Muslim garb helped him make a pile of what looked like pieces of the truck. And though a crowd had gathered to watch, it was strangely quiet, except for the crackling of the fire.
Pakistan's acting top security official, Rehman Malik, told NBC News today that the truck appears to have been carring 600 kilograms of potassium chloride, along with mortars, artillery, aluminum power, and the explosives RDX and TNT.
As chilling as that sounds, it was what we heard at the city's biggest hospital that saddened us the most.
Families of the hundreds unaccounted for had huddled in the dark outside the emergency room, as the injured were brought in. Some put on stretchers outside, because of the chaos inside.
Searching for their loved ones among the survivors, they move desperately from room to room. Here you see what the terrorists would rather people didn't know. Though the target was a symbol of the West, the greatest number of victims were Pakistanis, innocent men and women who were observing Ramadan.
We are about to leave the hospital when we hear it, women weeping in a hospital corridor. They have just learned someone they love is among the dead. Looking at the faces of the children waiting, you see the depth of the loss they are too young to fully understand.
This is one family among more than 260 who will never be the same.
Any journalist who tells you they are not traumatized to some degree by this work is a liar.
Seeing this human suffering leaves a mark, as well it should.
Photos courtesy of Ann Curry
