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Colombian mayor targeted in bomb attack

Members of the Colombian National Police work near the scene of a car bomb attack in the southern city of Neiva on Thursday. PHOTO: EPA

A Colombian city mayor who was threatened by guerrillas narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on Thursday when rebels exploded a car bomb and wounded eight people near a radio station where she was speaking.

Neiva Mayor Cielo Gonzalez was broadcasting a program when her bodyguards noticed a suspicious car parked outside and ordered it removed. But the car exploded on a timer device as it was being towed away, police said.

"The blast occurred at 7:58am, right when I was preparing to leave the station," she told RCN television.

Urban bombings are less common since President Alvaro Uribe began a US-backed campaign to combat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the cocaine trade that fuels Latin America's oldest guerrilla war.

"Everything in the investigation points to an assassination attempt on the mayor of Neiva," Police Colonel Miguel Angel Bojaca said. "We have eight people wounded in the blast."

Local television showed images taken minutes after the blast of a bus in flames near the wrecked car and wounded motorcycle drivers lying in debris in Neiva, about 300km south of the capital Bogota.

Gonzalez has received threats from leftist guerrillas fighting the four-decade-old conflict. A grenade was fired at her house in 2003 and a bodyguard was killed during an assassination attempt on her father.

"This is the risk people involved in politics have to take, especially those in office in places with security problems like Neiva," Gonzalez told reporters.

Violence has ebbed in Colombia since Uribe came to office in 2002 helped by millions of dollars in US aid to drive back the FARC and disarm more than 31,000 right-wing paramilitaries who once fought the rebels in a dirty war.

The FARC remains a potent force in rural parts of the country. Last year around 600 soldiers and police were killed in combat with the FARC and other armed groups and thousands of people are forced from their homes each year by combat.
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