SANTIAGO – A bomb exploded early Thursday outside a Banco del Estado branch in Santiago, damaging the windows, Chilean police said.

The bomb went off around 1:30 a.m. at the bank’s Recoleta district office, located some two kilometers (1.2 miles) north of the La Moneda presidential palace.

The bomb, which was made from a fire extinguisher, started a small fire that was quickly put out by the fire department.

The attack was similar to Tuesday afternoon’s blast at a Banco de Credito e Inversiones branch inside a Marriott hotel in Santiago’s affluent Las Condes neighborhood that shattered windows and wounded a security guard.

A previously unknown anarchist group claimed responsibility Wednesday for the bombing of the Banco de Credito e Inversiones branch.

The Efrain Plaza Olmedo Explosives Band said in an e-mail sent to Bio Bio radio that it was behind Tuesday’s attack.

“The tranquility of the world being built by defenders and administrators of this order of hunger and servitude has ended,” the group said.

The message also criticized the Marriott’s management for not heeding a telephone warning to evacuate the building, said to have been delivered 15 minutes before the explosion.

Calling the attack a “conscious act, charged with libertarian content,” the group vowed to carry out more bombings.

“Today we bomb this building, tomorrow there will be others. Attacks of this kind will continue, will expand and will intensify,” the e-mail said.

Chile has experienced 102 such bombings since 2004, most of them involving low-power, homemade explosive devices. No one has died in the incidents.

Responsibility for the blasts is usually claimed by anarchists or anti-globalization groups, some of them linked to Chile’s disgruntled Mapuche Indians.

Efrain Plaza Olmedo was an anarchist militant who gunned down two upper-class youths on a Santiago street corner in July 1912.

Sentenced to 40 years in prison, Plaza Olmedo was paroled in 1925 only to be found dead in the capital a few days after his release.

Authorities never determined whether he was murdered or committed suicide. EFE