Colombia: Suspected leftist rebels yesterday detonated a remote-control bomb attached to a motorcycle, killing 10 people and wounding 48 in a crowded street lined with restaurants and discos in southern Colombia, authorities said.
The device, packed with 3 to 5 kg of explosives, exploded at about 3 a.m. in the Zona Rosa district in the city of Florencia, 335 km south of the capital, as revellers were leaving the pubs to go home, according to Gen Luis Ardila, commander of the 12th Army Brigade in Florencia.
Two police officers patrolling the area were among the dead. The blast also killed a 12-year-old boy, and a girl had a leg amputated in hospital, officials said.
"Everything indicates the FARC terrorist group carried out the attack," Gen Ardila said in a telephone interview, referring to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla army known as FARC. "There were three pubs still open and people were leaving to go home when the bomb went off."
Florencia, the capital of the lawless Caqueta province, is near a former demilitarised area the government handed over to FARC rebels to hold peace talks that eventually collapsed. The 17,000-strong FARC, which has been fighting the state for four decades, has a strong presence in Caqueta.
In February, FARC rebels kidnapped three civilian US Defence Department contractors when their light aircraft crashed on a hillside near Florencia while on a mission to spy out drug crops. The FARC says the Americans are "prisoners of war".
Yesterday's bomb attack was a blow to President Alvaro Uribe's efforts to rein in indiscriminate violence in a war that claims the lives of thousands of people every year.
The conflict, fuelled by the drug trade, pits Marxist rebels against right-wing paramilitary outlaws and the military. - (Reuters)