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BOGOTA - Left-wing Colombian rebels killed five peasants and staged a mass kidnapping in a violent jungle area used by the guerrillas to export cocaine, a local official said today.
"There are five dead and more than 200 kidnapped or disappeared," Dario Blandon, ombudsman for the town of Riosucio in the western province of Choco, told Reuters.
Neither the Colombian army nor police had information confirming Blandon's report. Government investigators and representatives of the Red Cross are scheduled to arrive in the area on Friday.
Riosucio is used for the importing of arms and exporting of cocaine by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the four-decade-old Marxist group known as the FARC.
The zone is a trafficking corridor where jungles make it difficult for the Colombian army to track smugglers on the rivers leading north into Panama. The FARC killed 10 peasants in the area and briefly took 170 hostage in July 2006.
"Those smuggling routes are very valuable, which is why blood is constantly being spilled to control them," said Pablo Casas, analyst at Bogota think tank Security & Democracy.
- REUTERS
