PARIS - A rush-hour bomb blast in an underground commuter rail station last night killed two people and seriously wounded dozens of others, immediately raising fears that a terrorist bombing campaign last year had been resumed.
As ambulances and armored security vehicles converged on the Port-Royal station on the Boulevard Montparnasse, French authorities called the explosion a criminal attack, and Prime Minister Alain Juppe declared at the scene that he would reactivate a counter-terrorist operation aimed at Muslim militants linked to Algerian opposition factions.
The Armed Islamic Group, which is waging a guerrilla war against Algeria's military-backed government, laid siege to Paris for four months last year with a series of bombings that killed eight persons. The timing of last night's incident, the reported bomb type and the deliberate effort to kill and maim struck most observers as trademarks of the group.
President Jacques Chirac decried the blast as an act of "barbarism, of terrorism."
The attack could not have happened at a worse time for France. An unpleasant truckers' strike was just concluded, and a series of painful budget cuts are in the offing. Chirac and Juppe have the lowest ratings of any French leaders in decades, and public pessimism is running high, according to polls.
The death toll from last night's explosion was expected to increase. Among the injured were seven gravely wounded, 21 seriously hurt and another 48 described as "impacted" by the blast.
Police and officials, according to French television reports, quickly concluded that the explosive device was a 28-pound gas canister, similar to the bombs used in last year's attacks, planted on the tunnel track or in a train car.
The bomb destroyed the fourth car of a southbound light-rail train as it entered the station at 6:05 p.m. The explosion was so strong it threw several passengers out of the car and onto the platform. Officials said the impact would have been much worse had the train been traveling in the tunnel at the time of the blast.
Marcel Raphael, who was standing on the sidewalk about 50 yards from the station entrance, described "a kaboom," and then, "People came stumbling up, so stunned they couldn't say what happened right away. Then they said there had been an explosion and people were dead."
At La Closerie des Lilas, a venerable restaurant steps from the station, waiter Guillaume Bourneuf said windows rattled and white smoke could be seen pouring from the station entrance.
The explosion took place in a neighborhood of hospitals, where many of the injured were rushed.
Looking grim as he broke off an evening meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Chirac pledged "to fight with every means at our disposal against terrorism in all of its forms."
Firefighters' captain Jean-Luc Chivot said the way the cars were bent and broken was similar to the damage inflicted in last year's bombings.
Last year's program of tight security measures, including a heavy army and police presence in Paris and across France, was prompted by a series of bombings in the capital tied to Algerian terrorists.
If the bombing was the work of the Armed Islamic group, the militants could have been responding to the results of a constitutional referendum in Algeria last Thursday banning Islam-based political parties. The military-backed government in the former French territory, which annulled democratic elections five years ago, claimed its margin of victory in the referendum to be at record levels of participation and support.
The government's figures are widely disbelieved, but peaceful opposition groups were frustrated by the image enhancement the authoritarian government might derive from a peaceful democratic exercise.