Peru On High Alert After Bombing

Peru put its security forces on red alert and closed off streets in the capital ahead of a weekend visit by President Bush, tightening security after a deadly bombing near the U.S. Embassy raised fears of resurgent guerrilla violence.

The 110-pound car bomb late Wednesday left nine Peruvians dead and was the country's worst terrorist attack in five years. It also led to fears that the Shining Path rebel movement, which bloodied the country until the late 1990s, was making a comeback, though no group has claimed responsibility.

"Be sure, we will get to the bottom of this and capture those responsible," President Alejandro Toledo said as he toured the bomb site Thursday night. "We will use a firm and heavy hand within the democracy and no one will be able to say democracy is weak."

Bush, who is in Monterrey, Mexico for a U.N. development summit, has vowed to go ahead with his trip to Peru on Saturday. He is to meet Toledo and the leaders from Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador as part of his first trip to South America as president.

"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," Bush said.

U.S. Ambassador John Hamilton attended a wake for one of two policemen killed in the blast and later said the attack would not get in the way of the presidential visit. "Those who resort to violence will fail."

Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi had said before the blast that 7,000 police officers would be mobilized to secure Lima during Bush's visit. The security will be tightened further, officials said.

Following the bombing, Peru's armed forces and national police stationed in Lima were put on "red alert," which means they are essentially on call for immediate deployment, Vice President Raul Diez Canseco said.

The streets around Lima's central plaza and the Government Palace, where Bush will meet with Toledo, were also closed off. Rospigliosi warned that other parts of the city, including entire avenues, would be restricted during Bush's stay.

Prior to the bombing, Rospigliosi had already said that no flights would be permitted over Lima during Bush's visit and that any unauthorized flights would be shot down. Lima's main airport will be shut down for several hours around the time of Bush's arrival, he said.

The bomb ripped through an open-air shopping mall of upscale stores and boutiques but did not damage the fortress-like embassy, set far back from the street behind a high wall. Bodies lay amid shattered glass and blackened debris of the wrecked cars. No Americans were among the dead.

Rospigliosi offered theories ranging from international terrorist groups to leftist rebels and sympathizers of the regime of former president Alberto Fujimori, who fled Peru in 2000 amid a corruption scandal that toppled his decade-long regime.

But some U.S. officials and Peruvian counterinsurgency experts cast suspicion on the Shining Path, the rebel movement that killed thousands in a decades-long campaign of bombings, assassinations and massacres.

In Washington, a U.S. State Department official said the rebel group is the "likely suspect" in the attack.

Jhon Caro, a former director of Peru's anti-terrorism police, said the attack was probably provoked by "Bush's declarations that he is going to fight against terrorism around the world."

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Maoist Shining Path terrorized Lima with a series of car bombings. At its height, the group numbered some 10,000 fighters, but was all but crushed by the late 1990s.

More than 30,000 people were killed in insurgencies led by the Shining Path and the much smaller Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

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. Officials announced in December they had broken up efforts to form a Shining Path cell in Lima to plot bombing attacks, including against the U.S. Embassy.