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Colombia car bomb injures at least 32

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A powerful car bomb ripped through a luxury hotel in Colombia's second-largest city of Cali Friday night, injuring at least 32 people, emergency officials said.

Police and fire department officials said there were no confirmed fatalities, but added three victims, including a hotel security guard, were in hospital in a critical condition.

The bomb blew at 7 p.m. local time , spraying the glass facade of the Hotel Torre de Cali into the lobby and shattering windows in the first 20 floors of the 41-story building -- the tallest in the city.

Among the injured were two members of local first division soccer team Caldas, as well as former Colombian national team coach Javier Alvarez, police said.

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Guests were trapped for hours in levels above the flaming ruin of the first floor.

"I felt a strong explosion. Everything shook and then it all collapsed and fragments of glass and walls fell down and everything was chaos and the lights went out," a man who was in the lobby at the time of the blast told local radio.

Firefighters doused twisted wrecks of smoking cars in the street outside the hotel, in a busy commercial area of Cali, home to two million people.

The bomb, containing around 110 pounds of dynamite, exploded inside a stolen blue 1996 Chevrolet pick-up truck, police said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the rush-hour attack, which caught the hotel -- the site of one of the city's most fashionable gyms -- at one of its busiest hours.

Colombia is locked in a 37-year-old war pitting leftist rebels, ultra-right paramilitary forces and the army in a conflict that has claimed 40,000 civilian lives in the past decade.

Colombia's criminals are also notorious for their use of violence and a January shopping mall blast in the industrial city of Medellin was widely blamed on local mafia.

The Medellin bomb -- also timed for rush hour -- killed one woman and injured 50 people.

On Thursday, gunmen killed a television sports reporter in Cali, shooting him six times in the head.

Another sports writer died after being shot three times in the head in the city of Medellin on Tuesday.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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