Colombia Police Station Bombings Kill 7 Officers
Then, early on Sunday morning, the Barranquilla police were hit with another bomb, this
one at a small police station, which wounded four officers and three civilians.
28, 2018
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A wave of bombings carried out against police stations this weekend has rocked Colombia’s
Caribbean coast, with three attacks within 24 hours killing seven officers and wounding dozens more.
The authorities are working on the assumption that more attacks are planned, and have not discounted the possibility
that all three attacks were carried out by the same criminal organization.
But Colombia has also recently been hit by multiple attacks from the National Liberation Army, or E.L.N., a smaller
leftist guerrilla group, which has launched a series of attacks against security forces and oil infrastructure.
In the coastal region of Colombia where the attacks took place, there has been an increase in activity from a number of criminal groups
that are looking to move into territory abandoned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The attacks against the police reminded many Colombians of the violence the country endured in the 1980s
and early 1990s, when some 550 police officers were murdered under the orders of Pablo Escobar, the powerful drug lord.
