200 Wounded in British Bomb Blast

In a carefully timed terrorist act, a car bomb exploded in the heart of the northern English city of Manchester on Saturday, wounding more than 200 people and dealing a savage blow to peace hopes in Northern Ireland.

Police said a man speaking with an Irish accent and using a recognized code word of the Irish Republican Army phoned in warnings of the attack, and quick response spared the shopper-filled city center from a deadlier outcome.

“This explosion looks like the work of the IRA,” Prime Minister John Major said. The bomb, he said, “was intended to maim and to kill.”

Saturday night, analysts in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland,said the blast could be read as what one called “the IRA’s ‘Go to hell’ ” to the stuttering peace process. Or, he said, it might presage a quick cease-fire declaration by IRA leaders who believe that such a show of strength and resolve would improve Sinn Fein’s standing in negotiations.

Northern Ireland peace talks opened in Belfast last week, but they do not include Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, because the guerrilla organization has yet to declare a cease-fire.

In Manchester, ambulance officials said 206 people were treated for injuries, mostly cuts from glass.

About half a dozen victims remained in hospitals overnight, including one pregnant woman whose condition was stable. Doctors said her baby was not at risk.

The late-morning blast spewed what one survivor called a “white shower” of glass and debris on workers and shoppers being evacuated from the Arndale Center mall, from nearby shopping streets and from the city’s two train stations.

Bomb experts were attempting to disarm the device remotely when the explosion occurred at 11:20 a.m., 80 minutes after the phoned warning. An hour before that, a traffic warden had ticketed the van that held the bomb for being illegally parked.

Downtown police surveillance cameras photographed the van moments before it exploded, raising the possibility that they may have also recorded whoever parked it. Police would not comment Saturday night.

“They always seem to know when to do it when there are so many people. They have no thought for women and children. It’s a noise I’ll never forget,” shop worker Silvia Glen, who was hurled against a wall by the blast, told British reporters.

Victims streamed into local hospitals to have cuts cleaned and closed. Rescue workers said the advance warning had meant the difference between life and death for many who had flocked to shops in the center of the city on a bright summer morning.

Manchester-area hospitals, veterans of twin 1992 bombings that wounded 60, activated emergency plans as 80 ambulances and 20 firetrucks crowded into the damaged and devastated center where several small fires burned briefly and burglar alarms wailed, set off by the blast.

“The main damage is to the Arndale Center itself. About 40 meters of the front of the building has fallen into the roadway. Office buildings around it for a couple of hundred meters have had their windows shattered, and there is glass strewn about everywhere,” said a spokesman for the Fire Department in Manchester, an industrial center about 180 miles northwest of London.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the IRA, but the blast bore hallmarks of the guerrillas who have been fighting the British government for more than two decades.

The bomb was timed to go off as Queen Elizabeth, officially celebrating her 70th birthday, was reviewing a Trooping the Color ceremony by the Irish Guards in London.

The queen, informed of the attack when she returned to Buckingham Palace after the ceremony, said she was “shocked and deeply saddened.”

In Manchester, the crowd was thick: Shoppers looking for Father’s Day presents were joined by young people anticipating a Simply Red concert Saturday night and by soccer fans from Germany and Russia in town for a European championship game today.

The concert was canceled. The game will be go on as scheduled this afternoon, but a vast area of the city, extending nearly to the Manchester United stadium where the match will be played, was still cordoned off late Saturday night.

The IRA has been under fierce pressure to declare a cease-fire that would allow Sinn Fein to participate in peace talks that opened last Monday.

Former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, chairman of the talks, condemned the blast in a statement issued jointly by his colleagues, former Canadian Chief of Staff Gen. John de Chastelaine and former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri. “This reprehensible act comes at a crucial time, just days after multi-party talks began,” it said. “We believe that the way to peace is not through violence but rather through meaningful dialogue.”

The IRA broke its own 17-month truce in February and has set off a number of bombs in London since, but until Saturday there had been no such attacks elsewhere in mainland Britain or in Northern Ireland.

In Washington, Saturday’s bombing deeply disappointed a White House that had been hoping for weeks that the IRA would announce a resumption of its cease-fire.

President Clinton described himself as “deeply outraged” by “this brutal and cowardly act of terrorism.”

And Major declared: “Sinn Fein has been clamoring to attend the Northern Ireland peace talks which began last week. If they are really serious about wanting peace, they must condemn this act and demand an unequivocal IRA cease-fire now.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who insists that the party’s electoral mandate is the only admission ticket it should need to talk about peace, was elliptical.

“Whatever the cause of this morning’s incident in Manchester, Sinn Fein’s focus remains firmly fixed on the need to restore the peace process, and we will not be deflected from that task,” Adams said in Belfast.

Adams says he speaks for the IRA but that Sinn Fein does not control the guerrillas.

Britain and unionist parties in Northern Ireland insist that Sinn Fein and the IRA are virtually indistinguishable.

A spokesman for the largest unionist party called Saturday for Britain and Ireland to refuse any further contacts with Sinn Fein.

Among moderates, though, it is argued that Adams must walk a narrow line in attempting to persuade the IRA’s Old Guard to accept peace talks over war.

“I still believe there are the doves--and I believe Gerry Adams is one of them--who are trying to get a cease-fire, but this makes it more difficult,” said Joe Hendron, a member of Parliament representing a moderate Catholic party in Northern Ireland.

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Washington contributed to this report.