A powerful car bomb exploded yesterday outside a police station in Georgia, killing three people and injuring 13 others, authorities said.

The blast occurred near a regional police headquarters in the town of Gori, the closest regional center to the breakaway South Ossetia region, shattering windows of the three-storey building and leaving a crater in the street outside.

Three policemen were killed and 13 other people were injured, three of them severely, Defence Minister Irakly Okruashvili said in televised comments from the scene of the blast.

The explosion in a Russian-made Zhiguli car charred several other vehicles nearby, broke windows, damaged the facade of the police building and left a crater about three meters wide in the street.

"This was not a random occurrence," Okruashvili said. "We are dealing with a well organized terrorist act."

Interior Ministry spokesman Guram Donadze also said the blast was a terrorist act, but there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast and neither he nor the military chief speculated on who might have committed it. Okruashvili said authorities were searching for people who were identified as suspects, but he did not say who they were.

Gori is the capital of Georgia's Shida Kartli region, which is adjacent to South Ossetia - one of two separatist regions that have run their own affairs since wars with Georgia's central government in the early 1990s.

Since his election in January 2004, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has vowed to reunite his country by bringing the breakaway regions back into the fold.

(China Daily February 2, 2005)