Colombian Politician Assassinated : South America: The leftist leader was the second presidential candidate to be killed in less than a year.

A leftist presidential candidate was shot and killed in a crowded Bogota airport this morning by a gunman who was then wounded by the candidate’s bodyguards in a gun battle, police said.

Bernardo Jaramillo, candidate for the leftist Patriotic Union party in the May 27 elections, was hit twice in the chest and died at a Bogota clinic, a nurse in the police clinic told reporters.

The wounded gunman was captured but a police agent said authorities were searching for an accomplice, apparently also wounded. They said they did not know his identity.

Radio reports said two others, a security police agent and a woman bystander, were also wounded in the attack and ensuing battle.

Jaramillo, described by one Patriotic Union member as “the most threatened man in Colombia,” was shot as he entered the domestic terminal in Bogota’s Eldorado International Airport to fly to the Caribbean coast for a vacation.

The politician’s bodyguards responded with automatic weapons and wounded the suspected assassin, identified tentatively as Jairo Restrepo Posada, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest, a bodyguard told radio reporters.

Right-wing death squads linked to drug traffickers and members of the army have killed more than 900 members of the 5-year-old Patriotic Union, organized by former members of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Front guerrilla group and communist politicians.

Patriotic Union spokesman Boris Cabrera said the gunman “was sitting reading a newspaper and when Jaramillo arrived at the entrance of the airport, he got up and uncovered a . . . submachine gun.”

“There was immediate confusion,” said a newspaper vendor at the airport. “Children, women and men ran at hearing the first shots and sought protection. No one knew what was going on.”

Jaramillo was the second presidential candidate in the May 27 election to be attacked in less than a year.

Liberal Party candidate Luis Carlos Galan Sarmiento was killed last Aug. 18 during a surge of violence by drug traffickers, prompting President Virgilio Barco Vargas to declare war on drug lords.