Rush-hour blast kills one in Kenyan capital

NAIROBI, June 11 (Reuters) An explosion on a busy central Nairobi street today killed at least one person and critically injured about six others, police and witnesses said.

A senior police officer on the scene said the explosion, at about 8 am 1030 IST appeared to be a suicide bombing.

The rush-hour blast sent passers-by flying and left a severed leg lodged in a shattered shop window at the scene, outside a row of shops near the Ambassadeur hotel.

A mangled corpse lay on the street.

''This sort of attack is very unusual for Nairobi,'' said the police officer, who asked not to be named.

Police Commissioner Hussein Ali said five or six people were injured and in critical condition after the explosion. Other reports said 10 people were hurt.

Some witnesses said a bomb had gone off in a waste bin, but others said it was held by someone in a bus queue. The blast shattered windows and burned a nearby bus.

Local KTN television said a man carrying a grenade was killed when it exploded as he tried to board the bus.

''It was a very loud explosion. I thought it was a tyre burst but it was louder,'' student Langat Justice, 20, said at the scene.

''Maybe this was a terror attack, we don't know.

PRE-ELECTION VIOLENCE Taxi-driver Bernard Kungu, 36, said he saw six people lying on the ground. He believed he had seen one of them running just before the blast.

''It sounded like a transformer had exploded but then the windows of the shops around me broke and glass was flying everywhere,'' he said.

''My ears are ringing and my eyes are smarting.'' Ali said the exact cause of the explosion was unknown and urged media not to speculate. ''There was a blast here. Was it something that somebody was carrying? ... We will get to know once we have investigated properly,.'' he added.

Police wielding batons, some of them on horseback, pushed back a crowd of several thousand people milling round the scene.

The blast came after weeks of violence by a criminal gang called Mungiki, notorious for beheading its enemies.

More than 30 people were killed by police last week in raids on a Nairobi slum which is a stronghold of the Mungiki, who have distributed leaflets calling for an uprising.

Tribal and criminal violence traditionally flares ahead of elections, and a presidential poll is due in December.

Kenya was the victim of bomb attacks that killed 225 people at the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998, and 15 at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa in 2002.

Al Qaeda was blamed for both those blasts.

Reuters SKB RN1411