Twenty-nine people were killed in fierce fighting on Wednesday after leftist guerrillas attacked a police station in northern Colombia in the country's bloodiest incident this year, officials said.
The violence came two weeks after President Alvaro Uribe renewed his vow to crush the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest and best-armed guerrilla group, who were blamed for the attack.
The dead included 17 police officers, 11 rebels and a civilian. Two police officers and a civilian were injured in the fighting, National Police chief Jorge Castro said.
PHOTO: AP
Guerrillas attacked the police station of Tierradentro, in the northern department of Cordoba, at 3am on Wednesday, firing rifles and launching home-made mortars made with gas cylinders, he said.
At least 150 guerrillas joined in the attack on the station, which had 70 police officers, he said.
Castro was in the provincial capital of Monteria to coordinate operations to hunt down the rebels.
Tierradentro is located some 380km north of Bogota.
The head of the Colombian Air Force, General Jorge Ballesteros, said he had ordered helicopter gunships and low-flying airplanes to the area to hunt down the rebels.
The region was formerly a stronghold of the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group that recently left the area after reaching a peace agreement with government negotiators. Some 31,000 AUC fighters disarmed as part of the peace process, according to the government.
Coca, the source plant for cocaine, is also widely grown in the region. Both leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary forces have financed operations through coca cultivation.
The illegal drug trade fuels the violence that has killed an estimated 200,000 Colombians over the past 40 years.
The fierce attack -- the deadliest this year -- comes two weeks after Uribe abruptly ended negotiations with the Marxist rebels on a hostage swap and ordered the army to step up operations aimed at rescuing abductees.
The swap deal would have exchanged 58 high-profile hostages, including former presidential candidate and senator Ingrid Betancourt, a French national, and three US nationals, for some 500 jailed rebels.
Uribe ended all speculation of a prisoner-for-hostages swap after a car bomb exploded in the country's largest military complex in Bogota on Oct. 19, wounding 21. Uribe quickly blamed the FARC for the attack.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema