At least six dead in embassy car bomb blast
At six people were killed and 30 injured in a car bomb explosion outside the US Embassy in the Peruvian capital, Lima, officials said.
The blast comes three days ahead of a visit by President George W Bush.
Details about the dead and injured were not clear, and some reports put the initial death toll at 10. At least four bodies could be seen in the rubble, including a boy wearing roller skates, radio reports said.
A US State Department official said no American citizens were hurt in the explosion.
Mr Bush is set to arrive in Lima on Saturday for a meeting with Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo and leaders from Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador.
The blast occurred at about 10.45pm local time yesterday (3.45am today), in front of an upmarket shopping centre, in an area with popular late-night restaurants and cinemas.
Interior minister Fernando Rospigliosi rushed to the scene and told reporters that the blast had killed two policemen and four other people. An unidentified fire department commander said the explosion had injured some 30 people, who were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment.
A car parked on the street exploded and blew out the windows on a seven storey hotel and bank across the street from the embassy, witnesses said. The embassy, a fortress-like structure with narrow windows, suffered no apparent damage, according to news reports. It sits behind a 20ft high wall and is set far back from the street.
The first television images from the scene showed the street littered with shattered glass, shards of brick and concrete and charred parts from a mangled car and a police vehicle.
Bomb squad police were roping off the scene with yellow tape and had covered at least two bloodied bodies with orange plastic tarpaulins.
In a separate blast yesterday, a small bomb exploded just before dawn outside an office of Peru’s Spanish-owned telephone company, police said.
The explosion damaged the first floor of a Telefonica payment office in northern Lima but caused no injuries, the company said in a statement.
Police said an unidentified man left the explosive in a backpack in front of the building and then fled in a car.
On Tuesday night, a package containing a grenade was tossed from a moving car onto a street in northeastern Lima. The grenade exploded but there were no injuries, police said. Neither of Peru’s largely defeated guerrilla movements - the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement - have taken responsibility for the incidents.
Both groups terrorised Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s with car bombings, assassinations and sabotage, although neither has set off explosives in Lima in several years.
The last car bomb that went off in Lima occurred in May 1997 and was set by the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. The rebel group was greatly weakened after the capture of its founder and other important leaders in the 1990s. In recent years it has had a presence only in remote jungle areas.
