A car packed with at least 50kg of explosives blew up in an office district of Colombia’s capital on Thursday, shattering windows in dozens of buildings and injuring nine people, police said. No deaths were reported.
It was the first car bombing in Bogota since a blast killed two people a year and a half ago and came five days after Juan Manuel Santos was sworn in as president.
The blast occurred at 5:30am, outside a 12-story building housing Caracol Radio, the Spanish news agency EFE and the Ecuadorean consulate, as well as the offices of several banks and politicians, including former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria.
PHOTO: AFP
Investigators were not sure of the target or who was behind the bombing, said Hermes Ardila, chief of prosecutors in a special anti-terrorism unit. He said by telephone eight hours after the bombing that investigators had not linked the attack to any particular armed group.
The president hurried to the scene and called the explosion “a terrorist act,” saying it was meant to sow fear and create skepticism about the new government.
“We are going to continue fighting terrorism with everything we have” said Santos, who took office last Saturday.
He replaced Alvaro Uribe, whose tough tactics sharply weakened the leftist guerrilla groups that have fought the government for decades.
Santos toured the blast site surrounded by security agents and urged Colombians to go on with their normal lives.
Bogota’s health secretary, Hector Zambrano, said at least nine people were injured. Most were treated for cuts and released, but three people remained under care, he said.
The city’s police chief General Cesar Pinzon said most of those hurt had been on a bus that was passing by as the bomb exploded.
Authorities said no arrests had been made.
National police operations director, General Orlando Paez, said the car was packed with at least 50kg of explosives and the blast shattered windows in at least 30 buildings, smashed the facade of a bank and left scraps of the destroyed car scattered in the street.
Pinzon said authorities had located the owner of the car that exploded. He had reported the vehicle stolen from a shopping center in the north of the city on July 31.
The director of the private Conflict Analysis Resource Center, Jorge Restrepo, said the fact the bomb went off before rush hour and used a relatively small amount of explosive showed it was meant as a political message. He called it “a very early greeting” to Santos’ government from armed groups.
The explosion “is an example that they still have the ability to execute this type of terrorist action,” Restrepo said.
A car bomb that exploded in March in the Pacific coast city of Buenaventura killed at least nine people and injured about 50.
Bogota had not suffered a car bombing since January last year, when a blast at an automatic teller machine killed two people.
Caracol Radio continued broadcasting despite the blast. None of the 12 people who work at the station at that hour were injured, manager Ricardo Alarcon said.
EFE’s director for Colombia, Esther Rebollo, said its offices were not damaged.
Governments across Latin America from Mexico to Argentina condemned the bombing, as did the Union of South American Nations.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government denounced the bombing, calling it a “terrorist act against the sister nation of Colombia and against its fervent desire to live in peace.”
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