Peru says bombers may be Shining Path

LIMA, Peru, April 1 (Reuters) - Peruvian authorities believe a radical wing of the leftist Shining Path rebel group planted a car bomb near the U.S. Embassy in Lima last month, a senior official said in an interview published on Monday. 

"We have identified those responsible for the March 20 (car-bomb) attack. ... This was a remnant (wing) of the Shining Path," Deputy Interior Minister Gino Costa told La Republica. 

Costa separately told reporters on Sunday that the state's anti-terrorism police were hunting the alleged attackers. No arrests have yet been made. 

The Maoist Shining Path group, which waged war in the 1980s and 1990s to make Peru a communist state and is still labeled a terrorist group by Washington, all but folded after the 1992 capture of its leader, Abimael Guzman. Officials say a few hundred die-hard rebels remain holed up in central mountain and jungle areas and have staged sporadic attacks. 

Nine people were killed and 30 injured when the bomb exploded across the street from the fortress-like U.S. Embassy three days before a visit by U.S. President George W. Bush. 

The attack triggered memories of Peru's bloody insurgency war that killed 30,000 people from 1980 to the late 1990s as the state battled Shining Path and the smaller Marxist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, best known for a 1996-97 hostage siege in Lima. 

The day after the attack, U.S. intelligence said signs pointed to Shining Path, which won a reputation as one of Latin America's most ruthless rebel groups. Some experts in Peru say the bomb could be the work of a faction linked to "Artemio," the highest-ranking Shining Path leader still at large. 

The government of President Alejandro Toledo has said some 450 die-hard Shining Path rebels are on the move in remote mountain and jungle areas, working hand-in-hand with drug runners in the world's No. 2 cocaine-producing nation. But it says their military capability is limited. 

Some experts had also suggested that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia could have been behind the attack as the United States seeks to increase its military involvement in Colombia. 

Others said supporters of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, who fled to Japan in November 2000 at the height of a mammoth government corruption scandal, could have planted the bomb in an attempt to destabilize Toledo's administration. 

Toledo took office last year promising to rid Peru of the corruption that marked Fujimori's 1990-2000 rule and is seeking to bring the former leader back to Peru for trial on charges of human-rights abuse and corruption. 

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