60 Police Dead in Colombia Attack
As government troops sought to retake a besieged frontier town, the Red Cross said Monday that 60 police were killed when guerrillas overran a police post over the weekend. More than 40 officers were taken prisoner.
Ten civilians also were killed as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, fighters overran Mitu, capital of Vaupes province near Brazil, in an attack that began before dawn Sunday.
The rebels pounded the base with homemade missiles a week before the government was due to withdraw troops from a large swath of the southeast to jump-start talks with FARC captains aimed at ending Colombia’s long-running civil conflict.
“It has not been possible to recover the corpses. . . .They are just lying there,” regional Red Cross chief Teddy Torbeaum said.
Walter Cote, national head of the Red Cross rescue division, said 10 civilians died as missiles made from gas cylinders packed with explosives reduced the base and two blocks of the town to rubble.
Many of the 5,000 inhabitants fled into the jungle when fighting broke out, Torbeaum said.
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