RAWALPINDI (Pakistan) - A SUICIDE bomber blew himself up outside a restaurant in Pakistan's garrison city of Rawalpindi, killing 14 people and wounding 18 others, police said on Tuesday.

Officials said the bomber had probably been targeting a mass protest which was scheduled for Monday in Rawalpindi and the capital Islamabad but was then called off after the government vowed to reinstate the country's top judge.

'Fifteen people have been killed and 18 injured,' said Rawalpindi regional police commander Nasir Durrani, including the bomber in the death toll.

'We have collected evidence from the site and talked to witnesses, and now come to the conclusion that the bomber was on foot,' Mr Durrani said. 'There is possibility that the suicide bomber may have disembarked from a vehicle before exploding himself.'

The attack in Rawalpindi, the city in which Pakistan's powerful military is headquartered, occurred late Monday near a taxi stand in a working-class area of the city, destroying several nearby cars.

'We had prior information that there could be an attack during the 'long march' in Rawalpindi and Islamabad,' interior ministry chief Rehman Malik told reporters.

'The people who did this are trying to destabilise Pakistan.' The dead were taken to different hospitals in the city.

'Four bodies were brought to the hospital and one injured person,' Doctor Mohammed Zia said at the Benazir Bhutto hospital in Rawalpindi. 'The fourth body is in pieces. An arm is the only intact piece,' he added.

Pakistan, a key US ally, has been hit by some 200 suicide and bomb attacks that have killed more than 1,600 people since government forces fought radical gunmen holed up in a mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.

Much of the violence has been concentrated in northwest Pakistan, where the army has been bogged down fighting Taliban hardliners and Al-Qaeda extremists, who fled there after the 2001 US-led invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan. -- AFP