Leaders of an outlawed right-wing paramilitary group severed informal peace talks with the government on Friday after accusing Colombian Army troops of massacring 12 young unarmed paramilitary members in eastern Colombia.
The army said the 12 paramilitary members were killed during combat, and journalists who traveled to the isolated area of eastern Colombia said the dead were all adult paramilitary fighters -- not children as the militia group claimed.
A photographer said the dead looked like they were aged between 20 and 30 years old.
Two paramilitary members who were captured in the operation said they were ambushed by government troops early Friday as the group of militia members was driving down a road.
The two survivors did not discuss whether they were armed, but the army said 10 rifles and a machine gun were found amid the dead and captured militia fighters.
Commanders of the Self-Defense Peasant Forces of Meta and Vichada said in a statement faxed to news media that it was severing informal peace talks with government representatives because of the killings.
The paramilitary group is one of a handful of illegal militia bands fighting leftist rebels across this South American country.
The High Commission of Peace, the government agency which has held informal contacts with various paramilitary groups, said it would refrain from commenting on the deaths until the circumstances were clarified.
In a statement, the army said troops of the 4th Division killed the paramilitary members in battle in a hamlet called Los Milagros, located near the town of Puerto Gaitan, 230km east of Bogota.
No government troops were killed or wounded in the fight, the army said.
The paramilitary units and the Colombian military are fighting a common enemy: two leftist rebel armies which have been waging war against a succession of elected governments for four decades.
The government has declared the paramilitary groups -- which have committed the most massacres in Colombia's war -- illegal.
But Colombian troops and police in many parts of the country still tolerate the militia groups, and critics say they sometimes even coordinate operations with them.
The Colombian military high command insists that it has been battling the paramilitaries as fiercely as it has been fighting the rebels, saying government troops have killed 88 paramilitary members and captured 542 through May of this year.
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