Colombia accused the ELN rebels yesterday of killing a Bogota police officer, then hiding explosives by his body and detonating them when colleagues rushed to his side, wounding five.
Defence Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said investigators suspect that urban guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN) killed the 19-year-old auxiliary officer as he was guarding a power substation on the capital’s north side on Wednesday night.
They then booby-trapped his body to take out his colleagues, he said.
“The leading theory is that this incident is the heinous and irresponsible work of the National Liberation Army ... to terrorise the civilian population,” Villegas told Caracol Radio.
Bogota mayor Enrique Penalosa also condemned it as a “terrorist attack”.
When police rushed to the scene, the attackers remotely detonated a charge of ammonal explosive mixed with shrapnel, wounding five more officers, Bogota police chief Hoover Penilla told a press conference.
It is the latest blow to President Juan Manuel Santos’s efforts to open peace talks with the ELN.
Proposed talks have stalled even as the government begins implementing a peace deal with a larger rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Both leftist guerrilla armies have been at war with the government since the 1960s, in a messy, multi-sided conflict that has killed more than 260,000 people.
The ELN and the government have agreed in principle to open peace talks.
A police officer is seen at a cordoned-off police station and a power substation where a colleague was killed.
