IRA-inspired car bomb kills 25 at exclusive Colombian club

By DAVID McKITTRICK

A car bomb that ripped through an exclusive club in Colombia's capital yesterday (NZ time), killing at least 25 people and injuring over 150, has raised fears that left-wing rebels are making good on their threats to attack the country's ruling class.

Although no one claimed responsibility, security sources blamed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, and said it reflected training the group had received from the IRA.

The third phase of the trial of three Irishmen accused of training Farc in urban warfare ended in Bogota on Friday, with the case being adjourned until 25 March. Speaking by mobile phone from inside the building yesterday, a senior police officer said he could see human remains in the still smoking rubble. The bomb stripped the walls from part of the building and buckled several concrete floors.

"It's nightmarish here," said the officer. The elite El Nogal Club was packed when the 200kg bomb, planted on the third level of the 12-storey building's car park, exploded shortly after 8pm on Friday local time. Survivors ran out on to Seventh Avenue, Bogota's main street, where scores of ambulances took the injured to hospitals around the city.

"I heard a loud explosion, and when I arrived minutes later I heard screaming and saw people running for their lives," said Desiderio Barracaldo, an employee of Caja Social Bank, across the street from the club. His white shirt was bloodstained from helping injured survivors to makeshift dressing stations.

"I carried some children away from the building,"' he added.

Well-dressed club members and uniformed waiters, many bleeding and with their faces blackened from soot, waited for medical attention. The El Nogal Club building is opposite the Spanish embassy and only four blocks from the British embassy. '

"This is undoubtedly the work of the Farc", German Camacho, director of the anti-terrorism unit of the state prosecutor's office, said at the scene.

"They had a perfect target - this is one of the country's most exclusive clubs, where ex-presidents, ministers and the upper class gather."

In Washington the US State Department echoed his claim, but other Colombian officials were more cautious.

The bombing was the worst terrorist attack in Colombia since Pablo Escobar's Medellin drug cartel waged war on the government in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yesterday a senior official said the authorities were not ruling out the possibility that the attack was the work of drugs traffickers, who have reacted angrily to the government's tough line on extradition of suspects to the US.

After visiting the scene just before midnight, a grim-faced President Alvaro Uribe, whose father was killed resisting a Farc kidnapping attempt 20 years ago, made a statement pledging to defeat "all terrorist groups".

He added: "This is a sharp reminder to the international community. Some of them have been too accommodating with Colombian terrorists."

The Farc has carried out several urban attacks since he took office last August.

Hours earlier, police officers and agents from the state prosecutor's office found five home-made mortars in a building close to the US embassy. It is thought that the missiles were to be used for a terrorist attack in the city.

The suggestion that the IRA has coached Farc guerrillas in terrorist techniques has been made not just by the government in Bogota but in Washington as well. While Irish republicans repeatedly issue blanket denials of serious involvement with Farc, the Colombian government insists that IRA technology and methods are playing an increasing part in rebel attacks.

Away from the court case, the authorities and Irish republicans have been waging an intensive propaganda battle concerning the guilt or innocence of the three Irishmen on trial. Bogota points to the hand of the IRA in mortar attacks and other bombings. Against such a background the truth is often obscure, though it is significant that the US supports the Colombian claims.

- INDEPENDENT