... in response to Yet another bomb, posted by Michael B on May 18, 2001By Ibon Villelabeitia
Reuters
BOGOTA (May 18) - At least six people were killed and another 50 were injured late on Thursday when a powerful car bomb exploded in an exclusive neighborhood in Colombia's third-largest city, Medellin, police said.
It was the second car bomb to explode in less than 15 days in violence-racked Colombia, which is torn by a 37-year-old war that has killed 40,000 civilians in the last decade.
''We have six people dead and 50 injured,'' Medellin Police Chief Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro told Reuters in a telephone interview from the scene. Castro said the suspects packed 20 kg of explosives into a car.
Television showed images of panic-stricken people, hurt by glass fragments and covered in blood, being hustled away in ambulances and other vehicles. Firefighters rushed to the scene and sprayed water on a twisted car believed to be the car bomb.
Emergency crews said many of the injured were in critical condition and local radio stations issued urgent calls for blood donors -- raising the possibility that the death toll could climb throughout the early morning hours.
The explosion occurred shortly after 10 p.m. on Thursday in a popular public park in the upscale sector of El Poblado in the northwestern city of Medellin.
The dead were at the park -- an area busy with side-street cafes, restaurants and night clubs -- at the time of the detonation, which destroyed shop windows, tore tree limbs and hurled shards of debris. Officials said the dead died at a hospital.
BLAST REKINDLES FEARS OF BOMBING CAMPAIGN
The blast, the deadliest in at least one year, rekindled fresh fears of a repetition of the bloody bombing campaign which swept through this Andean nation in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- the height of the drug war years.
That campaign, which traumatized many Colombians and killed hundreds, was carried out by a group of drug traffickers known as the ''Extraditables'' under the war cry: ''We prefer a tomb in Colombia than a prison in the United States.'' It was a reference to their opposition to being extradited to the United States on charges of drug trafficking.
On May 4, a powerful car bomb ripped through a luxury hotel in Cali, Colombia's second-largest city, injuring 32 people.
In January, a car bomb tore up a parking lot in El Tesoro shopping center in Medellin, killing at least one woman.
Medellin Mayor Luis Perez Gutierrez said Thursday's attack could be linked to a recent police crackdown on the city's notorious criminal gangs.
''We've had a lot of recent successes against criminal gangs. It wouldn't be surprising these bands, out of desperation, are behind the attack,'' he told private Caracol radio. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Medellin, the industrial hub of Colombia, is famous for being the city where former drug boss Pablo Escobar built his multimillion dollar empire before he was gunned down by an elite police unit on a Medellin rooftop in 1993.
Although the Medellin drug cartel has been dismantled, the city is still corroded by drug-related violence.
Medellin will be one of the host cities of the Copa America tournament to be staged in Colombia July 11-29.
Colombia, the world's No.1 producer of cocaine, is torn by a drug-fueled war that pits leftist guerrillas against outlawed right-wing militias and the army.
The United States, which consumes most of the drugs shipped out of Colombia, is spending $1 billion in mostly military aid to eradicate vast drug crops in Colombia's rebel-held southern jungles.
Reut02:05 05-18-01
