A man has been killed in the explosion of a homemade bomb near downtown Santiago in the latest of a series of recent explosions.
"The young man killed in the explosion may have been handling the homemade device when it went off," local prosecutor Claudio Orellana told reporters.
Orellana said the man, aged between 25 and 30, sustained serious injuries at the scene of the blast early on Thursday and died a short time later.
Doctors said his hand had been amputated and his skull fractured in the explosion.
The bomb shook the Yungay neighbourhood near the centre of the capital, where horrified witnesses saw the victim burn alive.
"There's a human being on fire, bring buckets of water!" a witness could be heard screaming in an amateur video broadcast on Chilean TV.
The bombing is the latest in a series of explosions that have left Chile on edge, in the worst violence to hit the nation in a quarter century.
Three people were arrested last week in connection with the most destructive attack, a blast at a Santiago subway station that injured 14 people on September 8.
Police are working to establish the identity of the victim in Thursday's blast and determine whether he was linked to the three arrested suspects, alleged members of an underground anarchist group.
The subway bombing was claimed by a group calling itself the "Cells of Fire Conspiracy", which said the attack was not meant to target civilians but the "structures of power".
Officials said there have been some 200 unsolved bombings across the country over the past five years, targeting banks, gyms, embassies and restaurants and other public places.
Share
