Islamabad, Pakistan — A suicide bomber killed eight people outside Denmark’s embassy in Pakistan yesterday in apparent retaliation for the publication of cartoons considered blasphemous by some Muslims.

The car bomb was detonated in a narrow road by the embassy’s main gate at about 1 p.m., killing seven Pakistani security personnel and an embassy cleaner, and injuring another 30 people. Four Danish staff present at the embassy were not harmed.

“Eight people have been killed, there are no foreigners among them,” a security official at the scene said.

The blast destroyed the embassy’s guard house and a 20-foot section of its perimeter wall, leaving a 3-foot-deep crater in the road.

There was no claim of responsibility, but Ben Venzke, of IntelCenter, an American group that monitors Al Qaeda messages, said the bombing was likely to be the work of the terror group or one of its affiliates.

The blast came within weeks of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior Al Qaeda figure, calling for attacks on Danish targets in response to the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed by several of the country’s newspapers.

“I urge and incite every Muslim who can harm Denmark to do so in support of the Prophet, God’s peace and prayers be upon him, and in defence of his honourable stature,” Mr. Zawahiri said in a video that surfaced in April.

Pakistan’s interior secretary, Kamal Shah, said the possible connection with the cartoons “will be part of the investigation.”

The embassy had been on a high security alert since the cartoons were originally published in late 2005 as part of an article on censorship and freedom of expression. They sparked protests across the Muslim world, including attacks on Danish missions.

In February, after Danish police claimed they had foiled a plot to kill Kurt Westergaard, 73, one of the cartoonists, Danish newspapers reprinted his cartoon, which portrayed the prophet with a lit bomb on top of his turban.

Days later, around 50 members of a hardline Islamic student group took to the streets of Karachi and burned a Danish flag in protest.

Despite warnings by PET, the Danish intelligence service, that the cartoons had increased the threat of attacks, Denmark refused to apologize, defending the newspapers’ right to freedom of expression.

Denmark’s foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller, said yesterday that the attack was an attempt to drive a wedge between Pakistan and the West.