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Suspected Bomb Explodes in Bogota

BOGOTA, august 12, 2010. (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded on Thursday in the north of Colombia's capital Bogota, injuring at least nine people and blowing out windows in the first major attack since President Juan Manuel Santos took office at the weekend.

A damaged bus sat abandoned on a main avenue its front window blown out, panicked residents stood in the streets, and investigators picked over the wreckage of the exploded car after the rare urban bombing in the capital.

"This is a terrorist attack," Santos told reporters at the site of the blast without giving details on who could be responsible for the explosion.

"Just like every terrorist attack, they want to spread fear, spread doubt among the people and the authorities, but they are not going to achieve that," he said.

Bombings and attacks on Colombian cities have dropped sharply since former President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. Violence from the country's war ebbed as Uribe's U.S.-backed security campaign battered leftist rebels and drug traffickers.

A FARC bomb killed nine people in the Pacific coastal town of Buenaventura in March this year. A bombing at a Blockbuster video store in Bogota killed two people in 2009 in an attack authorities said was linked to extortion by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The main anchorman of Caracol, one of the country's major radio stations, at times has received threats from armed groups and has in the past left Colombia for his safety.

Windows as high as 30 stories were blasted out in buildings along Bogota's main 7th Avenue and glass was still falling onto the streets after the early morning attack.

"I woke up and my floor and bed were covered in glass," said Mauricio Marentes, 28, a geologist who lives on the fourth floor of a building overlooking the blast site.

Santos pledged to continue Uribe's security campaign and his pro-investment policies that have helped the Andean country overcome the dark days of its conflict when bombings and massacres made daily newspaper headlines.

Markets dismissed the bombing, and the Colombian peso rose in early trading on continued expectations of strong investment flows.

Uribe sent troops out to reclaim areas once under FARC rebel control, and Latin America's oldest left-wing insurgency has been smashed to its weakest in decades. Several top commanders have been killed or captured and the FARC ranks have been thinned by desertions.
But the rebel group is still a force in rural areas where it has often allied itself with traffickers and paramilitary gangs to benefit from the cocaine trade. Guerrillas now rely on ambushes and home-made landmines to harry army patrols.

(Additional reporting by Hugh Bronstein, Luis Jaime Acosta and Nelson Bocanegra; editing by Vicki Allen and Jackie Frank)