Bicycle-Cart Bomb Injures 8 in Cocaine Capital

A terrorist bomb in a bicycle cart wounded eight persons and caused heavy damage Thursday in the city of Medellin, where defiant drug traffickers have been waging a terrorist campaign for the past week. A threatening telephone call warned of more casualties to come.

The explosion at mid-morning Thursday hit Colombia’s biggest paint factory on busy San Diego Avenue. An anonymous caller told radio stations that the blast was set off by “the Extraditables,” a grouping of Colombians wanted for drug trafficking in the United States.

The latest of 18 bomb explosions in Medellin during the past week, it was the first during daylight hours. The caller claiming responsibility said the bombers have changed their hours because of a night curfew decreed Wednesday.

“At night, when the bombs were placed, there were fewer victims, but now there will be more because they will be placed in daytime, when there are more people circulating,” Radio Caracol quoted the caller as saying.

Someone left the juice and ice cream vendor’s cart near the Pintuco paint factory on the south side of Medellin. When the cart bomb exploded, debris thrown by the blast hit at least eight people in the area, police and radio reports said.

Most of those wounded were workers or passers-by. The blast tore a large hole in the paint factory’s wall, shattered windows of buildings on the street and damaged more than 20 cars, some of them in a nearby automobile agency.

Despite an initial report of one death, police said Thursday evening that no one was killed.

Bombs killed one man Aug. 26 and another Sunday, but none of the previous blasts had wounded as many people as the one Thursday.

On Wednesday evening, about two hours before Medellin’s new 10 p.m. curfew began, grenades exploded at the city’s Club Campestre, Spanish for “country club,” and at an installation of the government petroleum company. No one was hurt.

During the night, more than 1,000 people were detained temporarily for being on the streets in violation of the curfew. Police held violators in a soccer stadium, releasing all but two on Thursday.

The bomb campaign appears to be aimed at eroding public support for an official crackdown on cocaine traffickers. The government blitz, which has included hundreds of successful raids by security forces, began on the same day two weeks ago that assassins killed a leading presidential candidate and the Medellin police commander.

Medellin is the home of Colombia’s most powerful and violent cocaine trafficking cartel. Luis Carlos Galan, the assassinated politician, was an outspoken opponent of the traffickers.

Meantime, the Defense Department in Washington said that as many as 100 U.S. military personnel will be sent to Colombia over the next four months to help train police and military units in this country’s battle against the drug cartels.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said the personnel will be sent perhaps starting Sunday, when two already-scheduled C-130 cargo aircraft carry military equipment to Colombia.