Bomb in Las Vegas garage kills man

A man who had just gotten off work at a casino hot dog stand was killed when a homemade bomb exploded as he picked it up off the roof of his car outside a Las Vegas Strip resort, authorities said Monday.

A woman who left the Luxor hotel-casino with the victim and was standing nearby escaped injury when the device blew up just after 4 a.m. on the top level of a two-story parking garage, according to police and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“She did not have a scratch on her,” Las Vegas police spokesman Bill Cassell said of the woman.

Police did not immediately identify the victim or the woman.

Cassell said detectives thought the man had been targeted and characterized the slaying as “a homicide with an unusual weapon.”

The bomb produced a blast equal to that of a stick of dynamite and blew a 12-inch hole in the man’s car, said ATF Senior Special Agent Tom Mangan.

Shrapnel penetrated nearby vehicles, and pieces of the bomb were scattered across the parking structure, Mangan said.

He declined to describe the bomb’s components.

Deputy Las Vegas Police Chief Ted Moody called it “a small device that was constructed in such a way to target a single individual victim.”

“It was successful in doing that, unfortunately,” he said.

Police said the explosion was not a terrorist act or a mob hit, but they would not say why the man might have been targeted.