BOGOTA BOMB KILLS SEVEN; DRUG-CARTEL LINK FEARED

BOGOTA, Colombia - A car bomb exploded on a busy Bogota avenue today,
killing at least seven people and injuring 41 in an attack police suspected
was either the work of Marxist rebels or powerful drug gangs enraged by the
Supreme Court's decision this week to approve the extradition to the United
States of two reputed drug kingpins.

The bomb destroyed a two-story house and a restaurant in an upscale
neighborhood and blew out the windows of banks, hotels and three
seven-story apartment buildings across the avenue about 150 feet away. It
appeared most of the victims were passers-by.

Mayor Enrique Penalosa said the blast, which appeared to have no specific
target other than civilians, seemed to be related to the government's
decision to resume extraditions.

It was the worst terrorist attack in Bogota since an anti-extradition
campaign of bombings led by the Medellin cocaine cartel, in which hundreds
of civilians died and government officials were assassinated until the
cartel was broken up in 1993. The late Medellin cartel drug lord Pablo
Escobar declared at the time: "We prefer a tomb in Colombia to a cell in
the United States."

Colombia's Supreme Court, in back-to-back rulings handed down in less than
24 hours this week, approved sending two of about 50 reputed drug
traffickers named in extradition warrants to stand trial in the United States.

The high court approved the U.S. request for 38-year-old Fernando Jose
Flores, whose arrest last August could make it possible for the United
States to put the jailed leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel on trial.

The decision to extradite Flores, a 308-pound-man nicknamed "Fatso,"
followed the approval Tuesday of the extradition of another Colombian to
the United States: Jaime Orlando Lara, a suspected heroin kingpin.

The extradition requests must now be approved by President Andres Pastrana,
who is widely expected to grant them. A former kidnap victim of the rival
Medellin cartel, Pastrana has tried to woo Washington's support by vowing
to fight drug traffickers.

Lara and Flores would be the first Colombians extradited to the United
States since the South American country's 1991 constitution outlawed the
practice in a concession during the Medellin terror campaign, then
reinstated it in December 1997.

A former director of the state security agency, Fernando Brito, said he
believed drug traffickers were responsible "because of the method used, in
an open space where anyone passing by could be killed."

"These methods were used in the past to pressure the government" not to
extradite alleged drug traffickers to the United States, where they face
far stiffer jail terms than in Colombia, Brito said.

Investigators had speculated that another bomb that exploded in central
Bogota yesterday was the work of leftist guerrillas, who have stepped up
kidnapping and extortion schemes in the last year to raise fresh funds for
their long-running war against the government. At least 35,000 people have
died in the last 10 years of fighting.

Colombia, which is estimated to supply 80 percent of the world's cocaine
and has become a major supplier of heroin to the United States, was twice
decertified or "blacklisted" by Washington earlier this decade for failing
to crack down hard enough on the drug trade.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration promised a major effort yesterday to
overcome budget obstacles in Congress to providing Colombia more aid for
combating its skyrocketing cocaine production.

President Clinton, seeking to reassure Colombian authorities who want $1.5
billion in U.S. funding as part of a $7.5 billion anti-drug plan, issued a
statement saying that fighting the drug war is "very much in America's own
national interest."