AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday
POLICE on Friday morning found and deactivated a bomb placed outside a pub in a suburb of Cape Town.
The device was discovered shortly before 7:00 am and the police had information indicating that is was due to detonate around midday when people would be lunching at the pub, acting police commissioner Zelda Holtzman said.
“It is very clear the public were the target. The clear intent was to maim and to kill,” she said.
Holtzman said the police were tipped off about the bomb and were holding two suspects for questioning.
The bomb was found under a flowerpot in the outside seating area of the pub which is a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the police detective services in Cape Town.
Safety and Security Minister Steve Tshwete, who visited the scene as police dogs combed it for a possible second bomb, raged that the bomb planters had committed a “filthy, filthy, filthy deed.”
“We are not going to relent until we have wiped them off the face of this province and the country. They are the scum of our society,” he told reporters.
Some 190 pipebombs have exploded in and around Cape Town since 1996, one of them outside Bellville police station.
In the past two years 21 bombs have detonated close to the city centre, killing three people and injuring 124. Several of the bombs were planted outside busy restaurants.
Tshwete has blamed the blasts on the Muslim vigilante group People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, whose chief commander has been charged with terrorism for ordering a number of bombings in 1997 and 1998.
To date no one has claimed responsibility for the bombings, nor has anybody been convicted for any of the blasts.
Holtzman told SABC public radio she suspected that the bomb was related to the spate of bombings in the city and said the police were bent on finally putting the bombers behind bars.
The government claims the bombers’ motive is to destabilise the country.
The last bomb to have exploded near the city went off outside a fish restaurant situated below the offices of the opposition Democratic Alliance political party in the southern suburb of Kenilworth on October 18.