Police in Honduras deactivated a grenade and detonated a second one found at a Tegucigalpa shopping center, a bomb squad officer told Efe.Bomb specialists dealt with "two devices" on Wednesday, not the three initially reported "by error" by another police spokesman, the bomb squad spokesman said. "What we had were two fragmentation grenades in the men's bathroom on the second floor of the shopping center, near the restaurants," the police officer said. "The two grenades were in different packages, one of which the contents were visible, allowing its deactivation," while "with the other one, there was no choice but to blow it up, which was done without personal harm, only to the bathroom," the bomb squad spokesman said.
The grenades had been set to explode simultaneously, based on an "electric watch mechanism" found at the scene, the police officer said.
The shopping center, one of the largest in the Honduran capital, is located about 300 meters (nearly 330 yards) east of the presidential palace and across from one of Tegucigalpa's best hotels. The individual who left the grenades at the shopping center opened one of the boxes, revealing the contents and allowing bomb experts to deactivate it, while the second grenade was detonated using high pressure water hoses, police said.
Honduras is caught up in a political crisis sparked by the June 28 ouster and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya, who slipped back into the country on Sept. 21 and remains holed up at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa. The de facto regime contends Zelaya's ouster was not a coup, insisting that the soldiers who dragged him from the presidential palace and put him on a plane to Costa Rica were simply enforcing a Supreme Court ban on the president's planned non-binding plebiscite on the idea of revising the constitution.
Though the coup leaders accuse Zelaya of seeking to extend his stay in office, any potential constitutional change to allow presidential re-election would not have taken place until well after the incumbent stepped down.
Time is running out to settle the conflict before Honduras's Nov. 29 presidential elections, as both the European Union and Washington have said they will not recognize the winner of that balloting unless Zelaya is restored to office beforehand.