PHILIPINES: Twenty people were killed and 146 injured yesterday in a powerful bomb attack at the busiest airport in the rebellion-torn southern Philippines, officials said.
The bomb pulverised an unguarded shed outside Davao airport on the island of Mindanao, where Muslim groups are seeking an independent state and a small number of US military advisers are giving counter-terrorism training to Filipino troops.
It was the deadliest terrorist attack in south-east Asia since the October 12th Bali bombing that killed more than 200 people.
The blast came amid increased Muslim guerrilla activity in Mindanao ahead of a planned deployment of US anti-terror troops in the southern stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom group, linked to al-Qaeda.
US embassy spokesman Mr Ronald Post in Manila said that one among four Americans injured in the blast had subsequently died. He did not identify the victims but there were no US military personnel among the injured or dead.
"The United States will work shoulder-to-shoulder with the Philippine government to make certain that those responsible are brought to justice," a White House spokesman said.
The death toll made it the worst attack in the Philippines since 1996, when suspected Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrillas sacked the Mindanao town of Ipil and killed more than 50 people.
And 22 people were killed in a series of bombings in Manila in December 2000 which was blamed on Islamic extremists.
Philippine President Ms Gloria Arroyo said police had arrested and were interrogating several men over the Davao blast.
The bombing "is a brazen act of terrorism that will not go unpunished", she said in a statement that named no suspects. "I assure you justice will be done."
Just after the airport attack, three people were wounded in another blast outside a government clinic in the nearby city of Tagum, officials said.
A Davao bus terminal also received a telephoned threat but bomb squads found no explosives there. The authorities shut down Davao airport as a precaution, while other airports in Mindanao stepped up security.
Mainly Christian Davao has 1.2 million people and is the largest city of the southern Philippines.
"It's a very powerful bomb. The waiting shed literally exploded," Davao's vice mayor, Mr Luis Bongoyan, said of the late-afternoon airport blast.
"We have suspects and we are running after them," Mindanao's police chief said, without elaborating.
Television footage showed a long line of hospital beds full of bloodied patients being attended to by medical staff. A long line of gurneys queued up at the courtyard to wheel in the arriving casualties.
Separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels, who were blamed in the car bombing of Cotabato airport on February 20th that killed one person and left six injured, condemned the Davao bombing and again denied responsibility, saying the group attacked "military targets" only.