BOGOTA – Unknown gunmen murdered four men in a stable on Sunday morning in the town of Caldas in northwestern Colombia, and three homosexuals were killed on a street in Cucuta, in the northeast, police said.

The bodies of the four men killed in the stable bore multiple bullet wounds and were discovered in the rural Chuscala area near Caldas, which itself is near Medellin.

According to the Caldas government secretary, Rodrigo Montoya, authorities are checking out versions of what happened, but it appears that the four men were abducted from the stable and killed elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in Cucuta, the capital of Norte de Santander province, police reported the murders of three male homosexuals, two of them younger than 16.

Col. Jorge Ivan Florez, the police commander in Cucuta, said that the three gay men were killed on a downtown street.

He said that “this could be a case of an evil known as ‘a social cleansing campaign’” given that in recent days pamphlets have been circulated around the city “in which unknown people are threatening thieves, drug sellers and sexual workers.”