Blast Rocks House Being Raided by Colombian Police; 16 Die, 40 Injured

A powerful blast leveled a home being raided by police Friday, killing 16 people and injuring more than 40 others in the latest of a string of urban bombings that have changed the dynamics of this country’s 40-year-old guerrilla war.

Acting on a tip, Colombian police and prosecutors raided a series of homes early Friday morning in a neighborhood near the airport in Neiva, a city about 150 miles southwest of Bogota, the capital.

They were searching for a supposed cache of mortar shells that leftist guerrillas purportedly planned to use in an assassination attempt against President Alvaro Uribe, whose airplane was to arrive at the airport this morning. The plane would have passed less than 400 yards above the neighborhood.

Around 5:30 a.m., shortly after the authorities entered the last of six homes searched, a powerful bomb exploded, destroying the building, damaging 15 nearby residences and shaking the neighborhood. Television video showed bloody people staggering from flattened homes.

A prosecutor accompanying the raid and nine police agents, including the regional secret-police chief, were killed. Three of the dead were children. At least half of the wounded were children, injured by debris as they slept. Gen. Teodoro Campo, head of the national police, blamed the bombing on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC for the guerrilla group’s Spanish initials.

“The home was located in the trajectory of the landing strip,” said Campo, who arrived on the scene shortly after the bombing. “All this leads us to think that it was a plan directed at an airplane.”

Colombia’s conflict pits the government and an illegal right-wing paramilitary force against leftist rebels.

The United States has become increasingly involved in the conflict, sending Special Forces to train Colombian troops and stepping up intelligence-sharing.

Traditionally, the war has been fought in the countryside, where FARC rebels would attack small police stations and remote military outposts. But Friday’s bombing was the most recent affirmation that the battle has moved to the cities. Colombia is still struggling to recover from an attack a week ago that left 34 dead and more than 160 wounded when a car bomb exploded in the parking garage of the country’s most exclusive private club.

Agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were called in to help investigate the blast, which was blamed on the FARC. The bomb allegedly was made from ANFO, a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The technology to build such devices was allegedly learned from the Irish Republican Army and the Spain’s Basque separatist group ETA. Three Irish men identified as being IRA members are on trial on charges of providing such training.

The FARC began using homemade mortar shells in August, when it launched an attack against Uribe on the day of his inauguration. The mortars went awry and killed more than a dozen people in a poor neighborhood near the presidential palace in the capital.

The rebels have mounted at least four attempts to assassinate Uribe that date back to his candidacy, when a bomb exploded and severely damaged his campaign vehicle.

But some doubted that Friday’s bombing was an assassination attempt, instead believing that the tip about the mortar shells was designed to lure the police officers to their deaths. No one was in the house when it was raided, and the explosion was produced by a 220-pound dynamite charge, not mortar shells.

“When they got to the patio of the house, the bomb was activated. It was a type of trap,” said a city official who declined to be named.