LIMA, Peru - Anti-terrorism experts cautioned Friday that pockets of Shining Path rebels will remain difficult to eradicate despite the recent arrest of the leader of an urban cell allegedly behind a car bombing near the U.S. Embassy.

"With the Shining Path, as with all terrorist groups throughout the world, there is not just one leader — when one falls the mandate passes on," said Raul Gonzalez, an expert on the Maoist rebel group.

Gonzalez said the attack, which killed 10 Peruvians just three days before a visit by President George W. Bush in March, demonstrates the passage of leadership. He said it contradicts imprisoned Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman's vow to seek a political solution to the 22-year conflict.

Interior Minister Gino Costa said the leader and two members of a Lima-based cell had been arrested and that the government is still seeking other guerrillas suspected in the car bombing.

"We have decapitated this cell of the Shining Path, but we must remain vigilant," he said.

The March car bombing marked the worst attack in Peru in five years and highlighted concerns that the group was resurrecting itself.

The Shining Path launched its campaign to overthrow the government and install a communist state in 1980. The group built a bloody reputation and often used bombings and assassinations.

Some 30,000 noncombatants, rebels, police agents and soldiers have been killed in fighting in the past two decades.

The violence dropped off significantly following Guzman's arrest in 1992, however. An average 3,500 people died each year in political violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the U.S. State Department attributed only 31 killings to the Shining Path last year.

The group's ranks have also shrunk. Government officials and experts estimate that no more than 500 armed combatants are operating today, down from an estimated 10,000 guerrillas in the early 1990s.

In a sign it is still regarded as dangerous, the group remains on the U.S. and European Union lists of global terrorist organizations.

Experts and officials also say that rebels operating in isolated river valleys of the Amazon jungle have changed their tactics, which once included slaughtering dozens of peasants in villages they viewed as unsympathetic to their revolutionary struggle.

"Now they want to be friends of the people," said Hector Jhon Caro, former head of Peru's anti-terrorism police. "Now they say that they aren't going to attack, that they were wrong before."

Although police said the Lima cell ran an internet cafe to help fund its operations, factions operating in the jungle regions have become involved with cocaine traffickers to finance their struggle.

"As long as the Shining Path is involved in drug trafficking, there will never be a final blow," Gonzalez said.

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