BOGOTA (Reuters) – Eight police officers were killed in an explosives attack in western Colombia on Friday, President Gustavo Petro said, the deadliest attack on security forces since he took office promising to end the country’s nearly 60-year conflict.
Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla, has pledged to seek “total peace” by restarting talks with leftist ELN rebels, applying a 2016 peace accord to former FARC guerrilla fighters who reject it and negotiating the surrender of crime gangs in exchange for reduced sentences.
“I forcefully reject the attack with explosives in San Luis, Huila where eight police died. Solidarity with their families,” Petro said on Twitter. “These acts are a clear sabotage to total peace. I have asked authorities to go to the area to take on the investigation.”
Police sources said the officials were killed when the vehicle in which they were traveling was hit with explosives.
Petro did not name the perpetrators of the attack, but so-called dissidents from the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels operate in the area according to security sources.
Dissident groups reject the peace accord negotiated by their former leadership and count some 2,400 fighters in their ranks, according to the government.
Several well-known dissident commanders have been killed recently, many in fighting across the border in Venezuela.
Colombia’s conflict between the government, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug trafficking gangs killed at least 450,000 people between 1985 and 2018 alone.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Sandra Maler)
