A remote-control bomb killed 11 people and wounded at least 40 in southern Colombia on Sunday when it ripped through a crowded street lined with restaurants and discos, authorities said.

The government blamed the blast on leftist rebels.

The roughly 10-pound bomb, attached to a motorcycle, exploded at about 3 a.m. in the Zona Rosa district in Florencia, 210 miles south of Bogota, as revelers were leaving bars to go home, said Gen. Luis Ardila, commander of the 12th Army Brigade in Florencia.

Two patrolling police officers were among the dead. The blast also killed a 12-year-old boy who sold candies on the street, and a 15-year-old girl had a leg amputated in hospital, doctors and military officials said.

The attack was a blow to President Alvaro Uribe's efforts to rein in indiscriminate violence in a four-decade guerrilla war that kills thousands of people every year.

"Colombia weeps but doesn't surrender," Uribe said in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta during a political gathering. "The only road we have left is to defeat terrorism."

Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez, who flew into Florencia to hold an emergency meeting with military commanders, said "all evidence indicates the FARC was behind this." She was referring to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla army known as FARC.

Television images showed one body lying in the middle of the street as ambulance workers and police frantically carried away the wounded. Reports of the number of wounded ranged from 40 to 48.

Revelers danced before explosion

"I had been dancing with a girlfriend. I left the pub and was talking to a police officer when the bomb exploded," a survivor told reporters from a hospital bed.

"There were a lot of people in the street, police officers enforcing the closing hours and many civilians," Ardila said.

Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, head of Colombia's armed forces, called the culprits "cowards and bandits" and said "they will pay for what they are doing to this country."

Florencia, the capital of the lawless Caqueta province, is near a former demilitarized area the government handed over to FARC rebels to hold peace talks that eventually collapsed. The 17,000-strong FARC, which has been fighting the state for four decades, has a strong presence in Caqueta. The city is also home to right-wing paramilitary outlaws.

Uribe, a close US ally elected in August 2002 on a law-and-order platform, has strengthened the US-backed military and passed a war tax to put more troops in the lawless countryside. But he has failed to capture senior rebel bosses.

The conflict, fueled by the drug trade, pits Marxist rebels against right-wing paramilitary outlaws and the military.

Security forces arrested 172 suspected leftist rebels in raids across the country on Sunday in one of the largest anti-guerrilla sweeps since Uribe took office, police said. The raids were not linked to the bombing in Florencia.

Gen. Luis Alfredo Rodriguez, operations director of the National Police, said the raids were carried out in the provinces of Cundinamarca, Risaralda and Valle.

He said the majority of the suspects are accused of providing intelligence to the FARC. Some were members of the smaller Popular Liberation Army, or EPL.

(China Daily September 29, 2003)