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“The authorities want to ascertain if it was a routine exercise or part of some special mission that does not have the approval of the government of Pakistan,” Pakistan’s largest newspaper The News reported.

The reports of the mysterious activity first surfaced in the Pakistani media on Sunday.

According to the accounts, several witnesses, including Pakistani government officials, described seeing a US embassy truckload of steel boxes unloaded while all entrances to and from the hotel were locked down at around midnight on the 16th September.

The cases were not taken through security scanners in the hotel’s lobby, but were shifted directly to the fourth and fifth floors, the same floors that fire broke out on after the truck bombing on Saturday.

“Already, the government has got information that several rooms on the fourth floor of the Marriott were in permanent use of the US authorities. Three of these rooms were said to be inter-connected and contained some intelligence equipment and other material allegedly used for espionage,” The News also reported.

The reports have also been picked up in the press in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

A US embassy statement said that the marines were a routine team of support personnel that often precede and/or accompany certain US government officials, and that the cases contained communication equipment.

Further rumours that several senior officers of the CIA were staying at the hotel at the time of the attack were also strenuously denied by the US embassy statement as “inaccurate, irresponsible, baseless and completely without any foundation whatsoever.”

“Al Qaeda” was quickly portioned with the blame once more just hours after the dust had settled, while the Taliban have also been touted as suspects.

Meanwhile new claims have surfaced linking the bombing to an Islamic fundamentalist group based in Iran.

In our leading article earlier this week which has since been picked up by the Pakistan Daily, we detailed how Pakistan’s new leadership were due to dine at the hotel, but changed the venue at the last minute, according to a senior government official.

A suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday, killing at least 60 people in a brazen attack in the heart of the Pakistan capital.

Around 200 people were wounded, some critically, and there were fears more dead would be found in the fiery wreckage of the hotel, a popular gathering place for politicians, foreigners and the Pakistan elite.

Officials said they were worried the building, engulfed in flame after the blast ruptured a gas pipeline, would collapse. A security official said many people leapt to their deaths from upper floors rather than be burnt alive.

The bombing came shortly after new President Asif Ali Zardari, who faces a struggle to rein in Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, delivered his inaugural address to parliament only a few hundred metres away.

It was one of the deadliest attacks in an increasingly bloody campaign by militants in Pakistan, a vital ally in the US-led “war on terror,” and presented Zardari with a major challenge just days after he took office.