COLOMBIA: The mortar blasts that killed 17 people near Mr Alvaro Uribe's inauguration served notice that FARC rebels plan to meet the new Colombian leader's hard line with an urban offensive, but police said on Wednesday the guerrillas had set up a dozen more mortars that were not fired.
Using technology which the Colombian authorities believe may have been acquired from the IRA, the rebels set up a battery of 16 remote-controlled mortars in a street within range of the colonial Congress where Mr Uribe took the presidential oath on Wednesday, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, police said.
Only four of the weapons were fired, hitting the nearby presidential palace and smashing into the notorious Cartucho Street, where most of the victims where homeless beggars.
It was not clear whether it was a quick police reaction or technical failure that prevented 12 of the mortars from firing.
"The tragedy could have been a lot worse. I don't want to imagine what could have happened if they had all been fired," said Police Gen Hector Castro.
The attack made a mockery of massive security precautions and showed that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong group known as FARC, has finally acquired the technical expertise to launch what it has long threatened - an urban offensive.
Mr Uribe, a right winger who has promised to crack down hard on the guerrillas, won the election in May amid widespread rejection of the government's peace negotiations with FARC, which collapsed in February.
He promised a military build-up in a 38-year-old war that kills thousands of civilians every year.
But even as he was swearing in, the 50-year-old lawyer was given a taste of the enormous challenge that lies ahead of him as a guerrilla war, long fought mainly in the lawless countryside exploded around the heart of government.
True to his tight-lipped style of action, not words, Mr Uribe did not refer to Wednesday's attack at all yesterday and went ahead with a planned trip to the Valledupar, where he was setting up a new scheme to stop guerrilla kidnaps on the highways.
After Wednesday's attack police said they found 120 mortars in another part of Bogota that were ready to fire and targeted either an army barracks or a military training school. The weapons were more sophisticated than traditional FARC armaments and bore the hallmarks of IRA technology, the police said.
Three Irish men are being held in a Colombian jail after being arrested last year for allegedly teaching advanced bomb techniques to the FARC.
Ironically, Mr Uribe's inauguration speech had a conciliatory tone, and he repeated a call for United Nations mediation in Colombia's conflict.
Both Mr Uribe and top-ranking officers in the armed forces say that negotiations are the only way to end the conflict.
But they believe the FARC, which draws its funds from the raw materials for cocaine and from kidnapping, must first be taught a military lesson.
US President George Bush, whose country has provided more than $1.5 billion in mainly military aid against Colombia's cocaine industry in the past few years, condemned the attacks from his Texas ranch, where he is on vacation.
"The United States stands with the people of Colombia in their struggle against terror, and we support President Uribe's efforts to bring the murderers to justice," he said. - (Reuters)