A car bomb detonated outside a police station in southwestern Colombia on Thursday, killing six people and wounding 30 in the region’s second such attack in less than 48 hours, officials said.
Those killed in the blast in the town of Villa Rica, in the department of Cauca, included the police station commander and at least three civilians, Villa Rica Mayor Juan Guillermo Mina said.
The station was nearly destroyed along with several nearby shops, TV news footage showed.
Photo: AFP
“We have never had this type of incident occur here and I hope that it never happens again,” Mina said.
The bombing came one day after nine people were killed and 69 wounded when the police station was bombed in the far southwestern port town of Tumaco. It was the third bombing in Tumaco this year, local officials said.
The government blamed leftist rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the Tumaco attack. While the Thursday attackers were unidentified, military officials say a FARC front operates in the region.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who traveled to Tumaco, said on Thursday that he was increasing security forces in the region.
“There is no justification for the attacks, and what they are doing is making any possibility of peace more difficult,” Santos said.
He said Tumaco has suffered enormously because it is a “strategic center for narcoterrorism,” and announced he would be sending 2,500 soldiers and marines, as well as 300 police officers, to the city.
Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon said the Tumaco attack was carried out by FARC guerrillas in alliance with Los Rastrajos, a criminal gang made up of former drug traffickers and ex-right-wing paramilitary fighters.
The FARC, founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 fighters across Colombia, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Leftist guerrillas with a rival group, the National Liberation Army, are also active in southwestern Colombia.
The various groups are struggling to control regions of Colombia’s Pacific coastline, key for exporting illegal drugs and smuggling in weapons.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees