At least 46 people were injured, five critically, yesterday when a home-made bomb ripped through a packed pizza restaurant in the popular Camps Bay beach resort near South Africa's top tourist destination.
"It was a pipe bomb hidden in a plastic bag under one of the tables in the restaurant," a police spokesman, Mr Neville Malila, said. No one admitted responsibility but police suspected Muslim extremists.
The bomb exploded just after 4 p.m. (2.30 p.m. Irish time) inside the popular pizzeria situated in a block housing several restaurants catering to an array of clients from young surfers to families.
Dr Gerald Dalbock, who helped treat traumatised victims at the restaurant, St Elmo's, said the casualties included a six-year-old boy. A girl of four was reported to have had a foot amputated and a woman of 20 a leg.
Glass littered the road next to the beach where only four days earlier Mr Richard Branson hosted Cape Town's elite to celebrate the start of his Virgin Atlantic airline's flights to the city.
Cape Town was virtually in a state of siege a year ago after a bomb at a Planet Hollywood restaurant was followed by a series of other explosions, most of which were attributed to a Muslim group, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD).
But the city has been relatively quiet since January when police launched a major offensive, codenamed Operation Good Hope, against the plague of urban terrorism that included direct attacks on police stations.
PAGAD denied it was responsible for the earlier explosions, blaming the police for mounting a campaign against it - accusations bolstered by the discovery in January this year of a National Intelligence Agency operative among a PAGAD group arrested for possession of explosives.
On Friday a prominent PAGAD member was convicted of murdering four people in a shootout near the city's Waterfront tourist area in January. The regional Safety and Security Minister, Mr Mark Wiley, told reporters he would not be surprised if yesterday's blast was associated with the conviction.
The blast, which follows another at one of the city's gay bars less than a month ago, could not have come at a worse time for Cape Town as the city gears up to receive what it hopes will be a flood of tourists to celebrate the millennium.