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Death toll in Manila explosion rises to 11

"We are still continuously looking for bodies. We are still removing debris."

Jun-jun Binay, councilor overseeing the recovery efforts

The toll from a deadly bomb blast in a Manila shopping mall has risen to 11 after another body was found in rubble at the ravaged building and an injured man died in hospital, officials said yesterday.

A 23-year-old woman was found buried in the basement of the Glorietta shopping mall in Manila's financial district of Makati late on Saturday, said councilor Jun-jun Binay who is overseeing the recovery efforts.

And before dawn yesterday, a 24-year-old man injured in the explosion died in a Makati hospital from multiple wounds, hospital officials said.

Binay said rescuers were still searching the site after relatives of three more people reported them being at the mall during the explosion but that they had yet to return home.

"We are still continuously looking for bodies. We are still removing debris," he said, although he is doubtful there are any more dead bodies left inside the rubble.

Panic briefly gripped the mall once more when a fire broke out in a restaurant yesterday, forcing an evacuation.

However, a spokesman for the mall's operator, Alfonso Reyes, said the fire was unrelated to Friday's explosion, with the fire department blaming the later incident on faulty electric wiring.

Friday's blast tore through the mall shattering the concrete floor and punching a hole through the roof, leaving rubble strewn everywhere. Earlier, nine bodies were found at the site and more than 100 injured were treated after the explosion.

City police chief Geary Barias said that they had reconsidered an earlier theory that the blast originated from a delivery bay of a popular Chinese restaurant on the ground floor.

The evidence was "now pointing to the basement of the building," Barias said, adding that police were taking statements from workers in the area.

However the probe has been hampered by water and diesel fuel that leaked into the basement, flooding much of the area, he said.

Investigators say that evidence from the site indicates that a bomb containing military explosives caused the blast.

Military chief General Hermogenes Esperon said all military explosives have been accounted for except for the amount taken by military mutineers when they staged a short-lived attempt to oust Philippine President Gloria Arroyo in 2003.

The leaders of that plot were jailed and some 17 are still undergoing trial for their role in the mutiny.

One of the detained mutineers, Antonio Trillanes charged that Arroyo's government must be behind the blast but government officials challenged him to present proof.

Police will interview Trillanes who was elected to Senate earlier this year while campaigning in detention.

Reyes said that the mall operator has turned over video surveillance tapes to investigators.

A cellphone text message, supposedly from a Muslim extremist group, the Rajah Solaiman Movement, was sent to a reporter of top broadcaster ABS-CBN, claiming responsibility for the bombing.

However authorities are suspicious about this claim, saying the Rajah Solaiman Movement has been largely neutralized and that the language of the latest statement does not fit with previous statements by the group.

Binay said they still have "no suspects" for the blast which came weeks after military intelligence foiled an alleged plot by al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf Islamic militants to bomb the southern port city of Zamboanga.
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