"Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball."
George Orwell, Animal farm(Reuters) - Two bombs packed with ball bearings tore through crowds near the finish of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and triggering a massive hunt for those behind an attack the White House said would be treated as "an act of terror".
Officials said more than 100 people were wounded by the devices, which were packed with gunpowder and shrapnel to maximize injuries, according a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation who declined to be named.
"I saw people who looked like they had their legs blown off. There was a lot of blood over their legs. Then people were being pushed in wheelchairs," said Joe Anderson, 33, a fisherman from Pembroke, Massachusetts, who had just run the race holding a large U.S. flag.
Some victims would require further surgery in the coming days, said Peter Fagenholz, a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"We're seeing a lot of shrapnel injuries" from small metal debris, Fagenholz told reporters outside the hospital. Doctors treated 29 people, of whom eight were in a critical condition.
An eight-year-old boy was among the dead, the Boston Globe reported, citing two law enforcement sources briefed on the investigation. A two-year-old was being treated at Boston Children's Hospital for a head wound, the hospital said.
White House officials and investigators said it was too early to say whether the Boston attacks were carried out by a foreign or homegrown group or to identify a motive.
The attack was the worst bombing on American soil since far-right militant and U.S. citizen Timothy McVeigh set off a massive truck bomb that destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
Two years earlier, Islamist militants bombed the twin towers of the World trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than 1,000.
More, here: Investigators hunt for clues in marathon bombing | Reuters
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