BOGOTA, (Reuters) – A car bomb exploded yesterday outside a radio station in Colombia’s capital, wounding nine people and blowing out windows in the first major attack since President Juan Manuel Santos took office last weekend.
A damaged bus with its front window blown out sat abandoned on a main avenue near Caracol radio, panicked residents stood in the streets, and investigators picked over the wreckage of the exploded car soon after the rare bombing in Bogota.
“This is a terrorist attack,” Santos told reporters at the site of the blast without giving details on those responsible. “I believe this is a message, this is not gratuitous.”
Santos, a former defense minister, took office on Saturday promising to keep up former President Alvaro Uribe’s U.S.-backed war on FARC guerrillas. The bombing yesterday underscored the security challenges he still faces.
Bombings and attacks on Colombian cities dropped sharply after Uribe took office in 2002. Violence from the country’s war ebbed as Uribe’s security campaign sent troops out to battle leftist rebels, militia gangs and cocaine kingpins.
A FARC bomb killed nine people in the coastal town of Buenaventura last March. A bombing at a Blockbuster store in Bogota killed two people in 2009 in an attack authorities said was linked to extortion by the Revolu-tionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The government was cautious in attributing the latest attack to the FARC or cocaine traffickers who have at times used car bombs as an intimidation tactic.
“It is hard to say at this point who is behind this. It could be the FARC or could be other criminal groups,” said Markus Schultze-Kraft, an analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank’s office in Bogota.
