(Adds analyst comment, background, updates details) By Hugh Bronstein BOGOTA, Colombia, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded in the parking lot of a military school in Colombian capital Bogota on Thursday, wounding four soldiers and six civilians, authorities said. Police initially reported two people had been killed. But Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, speaking to reporters at the site, said later no one had died in the bombing, which he called "a typical terrorist act." Colombia is in four-decade-old war against drug-running leftist insurgents who often target police and military installations. Television showed images of charred vehicles near the Military University in northern Bogota, one of the most tightly guarded sites in this Andean country. The explosion occurred just before 9 a.m. (10 a.m. EDT/1400 GMT) Santos said the explosives entered the campus earlier in a Ford Explorer driven by someone dressed as a naval officer. Bogota and Colombia's other cities have seen a reduction in violence under President Alvaro Uribe, popular for his U.S.-backed crackdown on the rebels. He won re-election in May. But the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, still control wide swathes of countryside. "The FARC is saying, 'Look we can still get a car bomb into the most heavily guarded place in the country,'" said Carlos Jaramillo, a Bogota-based security analyst. "They are flexing their muscles ahead of any possible peace talks with the government." Uribe and the FARC are trying to agree to conditions for starting negotiations aimed at an exchange of prisoners and, perhaps, an eventual peace deal. More than 2,000 students were evacuated from the university after the blast, which destroyed five cars. The government has offered a reward of $425,000 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. Televised images of flames and panic took Bogota residents back to the 1980s and 1990s, when cocaine smugglers such as Pablo Escobar of the Medellin cartel hit the city with a wave of bombs intended to pressure the government to stop extraditing drug suspect to the United States.
