A top Colombian intelligence official resigned yesterday amid a scandal over accusations that rogue security agents on the payroll of drug lords had illegally wiretapped politicians, judges and journalists.
The telephone bugging charges are the latest scandal to rock the state security agency, known as DAS, and will further stain President Alvaro Uribe's campaign to stamp out corruption in state law enforcement in the world's top cocaine supplier.
Attorney General Mario Iguaran ordered his investigators to sweep into the DAS headquarters in Bogota to search for evidence of criminal activity by agents who had intercepted and monitored telephone calls.
Deputy director of DAS counterintelligence Jorge Alberto Lagos resigned shortly afterward.
The latest accusations were first made by the news magazine Semanain a report on DAS agents intercepting the phone calls of well-known journalists, politicians and magistrates to sell information to drug traffickers and armed gangs.
Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said the intelligence agents were likely in the pay of drug smugglers, but opposition leaders questioned those claims, saying Mr Uribe's administration would benefit most from the recordings.
Mr Uribe, a strong ally of the United States, has received billions of dollars in aid from Washington to help his fight against druglords and guerrillas. Violence and kidnappings from Colombia's four-decade conflict have declined sharply.
But officials in the armed forces and police agents are still often accused of taking bribes from drug lords. The justice minister's brother, a prosecutor in Medellin, was arrested last year in a probe into suspected drug ties.
The new scandal came to light just four months since the former intelligence director quit after admitting agents had spied on opponents of Uribe, a hardliner popular for his crackdown on the rebel group known as Farc.
In 2007, Mr Uribe fired his senior police chiefs after an illegal wiretapping scandal that fueled worries about intelligence practices in the Andean country. A former director has also been under investigation for ties to paramilitary death squads who later disarmed in a peace deal with Mr Uribe.
Reuters