Peruvian soldiers have captured a leader of the Shining Path rebel group after a clash in the Andes in which four guerrillas were killed and an officer wounded, the government says.
"The blow the remaining Shining Path members must be feeling in the Ene and Apurimac area must be very strong because he was the Number 2," Defence Minister Mr Aurelio Loret de Mola told reporters on Sunday.
The Ene and Apurimac valleys, some 300 miles southeast of Lima, are considered the last bastion of Shining Path.
The rebel movement, once one of Latin America's bloodiest, went into decline after the 1992 capture of its leader, but officials estimate a few hundred rebels remain holed up in Andean and jungle areas.
The government says some 135 rebels operate in the Ene and Apurimac valleys in alliance with drug traffickers.
The leader captured is Jaime Zuniga, also known as "Cirilo" or "Dalton," and officials said he took part in planning the kidnapping in June of 71 workers of Argentine company Techint, who were working on a gas pipeline in the Peruvian jungle.
Two other rebels were captured with "Cirilo" on Friday night, just after a clash between an army patrol and a ShiningPath column in which four rebels died and one officer was wounded. "Cirilo" suffered a bullet wound in his pelvis from the first clash.
A state truth commission has blamed Shining Path for more than half of the estimated 69,000 victims of rebel wars on the state in the 1980s and 1990s.