Medellin Park Bombing

 

 

A bomb blast ripped through a crowded park in Medellin Thursday night, killing at least 7 people and injuring at least 50 others, according to local authorities.

The car bomb went off at 10:15 p.m. in the Parque Lleras, a popular evening gathering place in an upscale area of Medellin.

Police estimate the car, a Volkswagen Beetle, was carrying approximately 70 pounds of explosives.

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 vehicle carrying the bomb.

Urgent call for blood donors

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.

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.

The blast -- which occurred in an area busy with side-street cafes, restaurants and night clubs -- destroyed shop windows, tore tree limbs and hurled shards of debris.

Blast rekindles worries

The bombing, the deadliest in at least a 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.

(http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/05/18/colombia.bomb.02/index.html)

 

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