ISLAMABAD (Agencies) - A suicide truck bomber attacked the Marriott Hotel in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, killing at least 40 people, wounding nearly 200 and starting a fire that swept through the hotel.

The explosion came hours after new President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, made his first address to parliament a few hundred metres away, calling for terrorism to be rooted out.

No Jordanians were present at the hotel, according to Ambassador Ahmad Mubeideen, head of the Foreign Ministry’s consular department.

The Foreign Ministry received several calls from the Jordanian embassy in Islamabad after the blast, confirming that all Jordanians there were safe and that none of them was present at the Marriott Hotel when the incident took place, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, quoted Mubeideen as saying.

Around 3,000 Jordanians live in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, as flames engulfed the hotel, which is popular with foreigners including diplomats and also rich Pakistanis, police said there were still people trapped inside.

"A car laden with explosives rammed the gate at the Marriott and so far we have brought out 40 dead bodies, but the number could well be higher," police chief Asghar Raza Gardazi said.

Flames and smoke poured out of the 290-room, city centre hotel. Dozens of cars outside the hotel were destroyed and windows were shattered in buildings hundreds of metres away, Reuters reported.

At least one foreigner was killed and about five were wounded, hospital officials said. Up to six Saudi Arabians were missing, the Saudi ambassador said.

Al Qaeda-linked fighters based in hideouts in the Afghan border have launched a bloody campaign of bomb attacks in retaliation for offensives by Pakistan's security forces in ethnic Pashtun tribal lands on the Afghan border.

The United States, frustrated by an intensifying Taleban insurgency in Afghanistan, has also stepped up attacks on militants in Pakistan with six missile attacks and a helicopter-borne ground assault this month. The US strikes have infuriated many Pakistanis, according to Reuters.

"This kind of threat is always there, given what's happening in the tribal areas, the military offensive and the US attacks, and the killing of innocents," said defence analyst Nasim Zehra.

The hotel has been bombed twice before but Saturday's blast was the most serious in Islamabad since Pakistan joined the US-led campaign against Islamists in late 2001.

A wounded hotel security official said a truck had been stopped at the hotel's front security barrier and two small explosions had gone off minutes before the main blast.

Warning

"There was a warning from security, they told us to go to the back of the hotel," Clemens Steinkanp, a German who was slightly wounded in the blast, said from a hospital bed.

"Nothing happened for five minutes ... but then there was a huge blast. Everything fell and there were a lot of bodies around," he said.

A crater up to 6 metres deep was blasted into the road next to the hotel's security barriers. The street was littered with debris and broken branches from roadside trees, and acrid smoke drifted in the air.

The interior ministry said 198 people had been wounded.

The US and British embassies said all their staff had been accounted for.

The White House condemned the Islamabad attack. "The United States will stand with Pakistan's democratically elected government as they confront this challenge," spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

The explosion brought down the ceiling in a banquet room where there were about 200 to 300 people at a meal to break the fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

A waiter, Mansoor Abbasi, was inside the hotel after the blast, calling out for survivors in the rubble.

"I was just setting down a glass when it happened ...

“Everybody started screaming. I pulled out 16 wounded people," said Abbasi, his jacket stained with blood.

The owner of the hotel, one of two five-star hotels in the capital, said the truck carrying the bomb had been stopped at the front barrier and guards on the gate exchanged fire with the attacker.

"Some shots were fired. One of our guards fired back, and in the meantime he detonated all the explosives. All the guards on the gate died," said hotel owner Sadruddin Hashwani.