Suicide Bomber Suspected in Pakistan : Terrorism: Officials fear that Egyptian radicals have taken campaign of violence abroad. Embassy blast leaves 15 dead and scores of others wounded.

With the devastating car bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan on Sunday, Islamic hard-liners battling the Cairo government apparently have served notice that they are carrying their terror campaign to foreign soil.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali said the “dastardly” attack in the capital, Islamabad, which killed 15 people and left scores more injured, was the work of a suicide bomber “who may have blasted his way through the gate and exploded his pickup truck.”

Egypt’s most extreme fundamentalist group, the Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group), claimed responsibility for the most destructive and deadly onslaught on Egyptian interests overseas since the group launched an armed struggle against the government in 1992. Later, two other groups, Islamic Jihad and the International Group for Justice, also claimed responsibility.

In June, the Gamaa al Islamiya said it had been behind a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the pro-Western leader who became president after the murder of Anwar Sadat by extremist Muslim soldiers in October, 1981.

Last Monday, a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat was shot to death in Geneva, and the previously unknown International Group for Justice claimed responsibility and threatened more attacks.

In Egypt on Sunday, Prime Minister Atef Sedki went on the airwaves to denounce the “criminal act” in Islamabad and called on all nations to unite to confront “international terrorism.”

The explosion, at 9:30 a.m. on a working day in mostly Muslim Pakistan, sheared off a huge chunk of the two-story building’s front wall and gouged a crater 10 feet deep and 20 feet wide inside the compound.

At least 59 people, including security guards and Pakistanis lined up to apply for visas, were injured, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said, and witnesses said many had lost arms or legs.

The blast was so intense that it seriously damaged the Japanese Embassy about 100 feet away, blowing in windows on the north side and injuring three Japanese and eight local employees with flying glass.

Retired Gen. Nasirullah Khan Babar, Pakistan’s Interior minister, came to inspect the damage and assured reporters that security outside other embassies in the capital would be tightened.

The Egyptian Embassy is about half a mile from the U.S. mission in the capital, and American diplomats customarily drive by it on their way to and from work.

“We’re lucky no Americans were injured,” embassy press attache Jack McCreary said.

Security at the razor-wire-ringed U.S. compound had already been beefed up after three American consular workers were gunned down--one of them survived--in a March 8 street ambush in the troubled port city of Karachi. But in light of Sunday’s bombing nearby, “we’re reviewing all of our security arrangements,” McCreary said.

Babar downplayed any connection between Sunday’s blast and last week’s fatal attack on a U.S.-run training center for the national guard of Saudi Arabia in that country’s capital, Riyadh.

Sunday’s bombing, the first to target a foreign mission in Islamabad, was a severe blow to the government of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who, like Mubarak, is a pro-Western voice for moderation in the Muslim world.

For many of Egypt’s Muslim militants, Pakistan is familiar territory, because hundreds--perhaps thousands--of them participated in the jihad, or Islamic holy war, against the former pro-Soviet regime in neighboring Afghanistan.

During the anti-Communist struggle in Afghanistan, which lasted from 1978 until the overthrow of President Najibullah in April, 1992, the Egyptian fighters from Gamaa al Islamiya, like most foreign Muslim combatants, were based in Peshawar, only 107 miles west of Islamabad.

If hard-liners from Egypt carried out Sunday’s bombing, Pakistani authorities will have to consider the likelihood that they had support or assistance from local Islamic fundamentalists.

Like Mubarak, Bhutto has been facing increasing opposition from radical domestic Muslim forces who view her rule as too pro-Western and corrupt.

Her foes appear to have some support in the highest echelons of the powerful armed forces. This fall, 36 army officers and soldiers were arrested, and Defense Minister Aftab Shahban Mirani said last week that they had been plotting an Islamic revolution to overthrow the government.

Since the Gamaa al Islamiya began its violent campaign against Mubarak three years ago, it has targeted top Egyptian government officials, police officers, Coptic Christians, foreign tourists and secular intellectuals.

Confronted with the terrorist threats and deeds, Mubarak’s government has responded fiercely. Thousands of suspects have been arrested and hundreds sent before military tribunals, which have sentenced 67 to death by hanging.

Since the beginning of the year, Egypt’s government has been claiming victory, asserting that Gamaa al Islamiya’s base of operations has been cut back to a single province, Minya in southern Egypt.