
BOGOTA – A police officer was killed and six others were wounded in separate attacks staged over the weekend by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas in the southwestern provinces of Nariño and Cauca, officials said.
Guerrillas booby-trapped an area near a police station in the city of Samaniego with a grenade, killing an officer, Nariño’s interior minister, Fabio Trujillo, said.
Two other officers were hospitalized and several civilians were wounded, Trujillo said, without providing figures on civilian casualties.
The FARC ambushed police in a rural area in Cauca province, wounding four officers.
The guerrillas opened fire on the officers and set off explosives at a place called El Patia, Cauca police chief Col. Ernesto Rodriguez said.
The officers belonged to a drug enforcement unit assigned to protect workers hired to eradicate illegal crops.
“In this part of the country, the FARC’s 8th Front” operates, Rodriguez said, adding that three of the wounded officers were taken to a hospital in Popayan, the capital of Cauca.
DAS security agency bomb specialists, meanwhile, deactivated a FARC car bomb over the weekend near a hospital in the southern section of Bogota, officials said. EFE