Peruvian president promises 'heavy hand' to crush terrorism

Peru’s president has vowed to use a ‘‘heavy hand’’ to put down terrorism in his country after a car bomb blast outside the US Embassy killed nine people.

Peruvian officials said yesterday that Wednesday’s attack had been timed ahead of a visit by US President George W Bush to Lima this weekend.

Mr Bush dismissed the bombing by what he called ‘‘two-bit terrorists’’ and said he would go ahead with the visit.

No group took responsibility for Wednesday night’s explosion, the worst terrorist attack in Peru in five years. But some US officials and Peruvian counterinsurgency experts pointed to the Shining Path, a rebel movement that killed thousands in a campaign of bombings, assassinations and massacres until it was all but crushed in the 1990s.

President Alejandro Toledo left a UN conference in Monterrey, Mexico, a day early, telling leaders gathered there before he headed home: ‘‘The courageous Peruvian people will not allow terrorism to return in Peru.’’

‘‘We will apply one heavy hand, and with the other, the law. We will apply all the necessary firmness and all the weight of the law,’’ he said.

The car bomb was believed to be made of a potent mix of dynamite, ammonium nitrate and a petroleum product such as fuel oil, a US intelligence official said in Washington.

The blast shattered windows and wrecked nearby cars, leaving the upmarket street in front of the US Embassy strewn with bodies, including those of two policemen and an 18-year-old man wearing roller skates. No Americans were among the nine people confirmed dead.

‘‘It’s terrible. It looks as if we are returning to the terrorism we knew before,’’ said 42-year-old Gonzalo Albin, who lives within three blocks of the explosion site.

Speaking in the Oval office in Washington, Mr Bush said: ‘‘You know, two-bit terrorists aren’t going to prevent me from doing what we need to do, and that is to promote our friendship in the hemisphere,’’ Mr Bush said in the Oval Office.

A US intelligence official said the bombing bore hallmarks of the Shining Path.

Jhon Caro, a former director of Peru’s anti-terrorism police, also blamed the Shining Path, saying the attack was probably provoked by ‘‘Bush’s declarations that he is going to fight against terrorism around the world’’.

The last Shining Path bombing in Lima was in 1997. The government says the movement still has about 500 combatants hiding out in the jungles of eastern Peru, and officials announced in December they had broken up efforts to form a Shining Path cell in the capital to plot bombing attacks, including against the US Embassy.

The car bomb ripped through an open-air shopping centre, but did not damage the fortress-like embassy, which is set far back from the street, behind a high wall.

The street outside the embassy was littered with shards of glass, brick and charred car parts. The blast shattered windows in a nearby bank and hotel building and damaged at least 10 cars, including a police vehicle.

‘‘I saw a mutilated body to my right and another on a stairway on the other side,’’ said Jose Victor Ortiz, 22, a business school student who lives nearby. ‘‘When I crouched down, I saw a policeman thrown down on the ground. He had glass encrusted in his cheek and his forehead and he was asking me to help him ... he couldn’t feel his legs.’’