AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday
A BOMB exploded on Wednesday outside a restaurant in Cape Town’s Kenilworth suburb, just south of the city centre, injuring four people, police and rescue sources said.
The bomb exploded around 9:00am in front of the Something Fishy eatery, which was not open for business, on the suburb’s Main Road, police said.
“It was a bomb. People were slighty injured,” a local policeman said.
A woman received serious but not life-threatening lacerations and three other people were slightly injured, Wayne Smith, a doctor with the Metropolitan Rescue Services said.
The blast did little damage, breaking a few windows and damaging a car.
While at the scene, police received threats that bombs would explode at a McDonald’s restaurant, about a kilometre away in the Claremont suburb, and at a primary school in the suburb.
Police evacuated and searched the McDonald’s area and found no explosives. The primary school was being searched, a policeman said.
The city has been plagued by a series of bomb blasts, with more than 100 explosions in the past four years.
In the last blast on September 12, seven people were wounded, one seriously, when a bomb detonated at a community centre in the city’s largely Muslim suburb of Athlone just before a meeting of the opposition Democratic Alliance.
Wednesday’s bomb, planted in a municipal dustbin, detonated outside the Kenilworth offices of the Democratic Alliance.
The wave of bombings in Cape Town have claimed three lives in the past two years and wounded more than 100 people.
Earlier this month, the leader of the Muslim vigilante group People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) was charged with orchestrating a series of bombings in the outlying areas of the city in 1997 and 1998.
This was the first time a known member of the high command of the group was charged in relation to the bombings, even though Safety and Security Minister Steve Tshwete has openly blamed the group for the blasts.