Car bomb - Hotel Torre in Cali

[STM]

A car bomb went off in upscale Hotel Torre in Cali.

Several people killed or injured.

[Pacino]

BOGOTA (Reuters) - A car bomb ripped through a luxury hotel in Colombia's second-largest city of Cali, hurling shards of glass into the lobby and injuring 32 people, including seven who remained hospitalized on Saturday, officials said.

There were no fatalities, but three of the victims, including a hotel security guard, were in serious condition, police and fire officials said.

The bomb blew at 7 p.m. local time (9:00 p.m. EDT) on Friday, spraying the glass facade of the Hotel Torre de Cali into the lobby and shattering windows on 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.

Hotel security guard Israel Moreno said he was keeping watch over guests' cars at the time of the blast. The explosion hurled him at least 10 feet, tore the cornea of his left eye, broke bones and cut him throughout his body.

``I'm probably going to stay here for a while,'' Moreno, who turns 58 on Sunday, told Reuters by telephone from his hospital bed. ``I've lost sight in my left eye, and they say I've been hurt pretty badly.''

The blast turned cars parked outside the hotel into twisted, smoking wrecks. The Torre de Cali is in a busy commercial area of the city, home to 2 million people.

The bombers had packed 110 pounds of dynamite in a stolen blue 1996 Chevrolet pickup truck, police said.

Motive Unclear

No one has claimed 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 lives in the past decade. But common criminals here 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.

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

Cali, long notorious for the defunct cocaine cartel of the same name, is due to be one of the host cities for the Latin America's Copa America soccer championship in July.

Police said despite the high profile injuries to soccer team members and the former national coach, there was no reason to believe the attack was directed at them.

``While we are not ruling anything out, it is not very likely they (team members) were the target. A lot of other people were injured in the blast,'' a police spokeswoman said.

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 Medellin earlier in the week.

There are no known motives for either crime, but attacks on journalists are frequent in Colombia.

Although anti-narcotics forces crushed the Cali cartel in 1995, the city continues to suffer from drug-related violence. Colombia, backed by more than $1 billion in mostly U.S. military aid, aims to eradicate the cocaine trade fueling the country's conflict with its Plan Colombia offensive on drugs.