Posted on 11/20/2002 3:56:23 PM PST by knighthawk
BOGOTA, Colombia -- Suspected leftist rebels posing as tourists planted two bombs that ripped through hotel rooms late on Tuesday in the coastal Colombian city of Santa Marta, killing one person and injuring five others, police said.
The first bomb exploded in a hotel room in the city center, about 620 miles (1,000km) north of Bogota. That blast injured four people. Another hotel attack followed on Santa Marta's outskirts, killing one person and injuring another.
Police said that in both cases the bombers checked into hotel rooms as tourists, planted the explosives and exited the buildings before the bombs detonated, Reuters reported.
Authorities chalked up the attacks to leftist rebels fighting a 38-year-old war in Colombia, but offered no evidence. The conflict has claimed 40,000 lives in the past decade, with urban bombings counting for just a small fraction of the death toll in Colombia's mostly rural guerrilla war.
Rebels with Colombia's two main rebel armies, the 17,000-member revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials FARC, and the smaller, Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, or ELN, operate in the area.
Far-right paramilitary gunmen also have a strong presence along the stretch of Colombia's Caribbean coastline.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in August pledging to stem bloodshed, had held bilateral talks with his Venezuelan counterpart in Santa Marta less than a week prior to the blasts. The hotel where those meetings took place was not targeted in Tuesday's attacks.
Earlier on Tuesday, police said they deactivated a 30-kilo (13.6 lbs) bomb left in front of a newspaper office in the city of Cucuta, the capital of Norte de Santander Province, near the Venezuelan border. Police Col. Carlos Barragan accused ELN rebels of planting the bomb.
The bomb attacks came the same the day the army claimed victory in combat in Colombia, saying it killed five ELN rebels and captured 52 other rebels from the ELN and the FARC. There are more than 20,000 rebel fighters in Colombia.
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