A Colombian police officer was killed and five other members of the armed forces were injured in combat on Sunday while chasing down Marxist rebels who killed a nine-year-old boy during an attack on a village three days ago, authorities said.
The military and police began hunting for a unit of Colombia's main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) immediately after the rebels attacked Toribio, 400km southeast of the capital, on Thursday said Major Adriana Alba of the Colombian army's 3rd Brigade. Three police officers and the boy were killed in that attack.
Alba said it has been slow going for government troops in the mountains above Toribio because the FARC littered the entire area with land mines.
President Alvaro Uribe had visited Toribio on Friday and called the FARC cowards for attacking the village.
The officer's death came on the heels of a military offensive earlier in the weekend in which at least 15 FARC rebels and other illegal fighters were killed by the military during pitched battles mainly in the north and northwest, authorities said.
Twelve of the illegal fighters killed were members of the FARC, while two were members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia -- a right-wing paramilitary group -- while another was from the leftist National Liberation Army.
Government forces sustained no injuries during those operations, officials said.
President Alvaro Uribe has promised to wipe out the FARC, which has been fighting to overthrow the government for 40 years. Military offensives by the army have significantly reduced the size of the leftist groups, but the FARC has shown recently it is still capable of deadly attacks on the military. More than 80 military members have been killed this year in FARC attacks, including the one on Toribio.
Meanwhile, five far-right paramilitary fighters, including an army sergeant secretly belonging to the illegal group, were killed in combat withsecurity forces on Sunday, officials said.
Army Commander Reinaldo Castellanos admitted that one of the dead militiamen was a member of the army, in the latest example of links between security forces and right-wing squads set up by drug traffickers and cattle ranchers in the 1980s to combat Marxist guerrillas in the Andean country.
The battle took place near the town of Cucuta on the Venezuelan border.
The paramilitaries have killed thousands of people in a war against leftist rebels and have earned international notoriety for massacring peasants, sometimes using crude weapons such as hammers and chain saws.
Members of the armed forces have often cooperated with right-ring militiamen against their common rebel foes although the government says aiding the paramilitaries constitutes treachery.
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