Peru rebels kill policemen in jungle ambush

LIMA - Peruvian rebels killed five policemen and wounded an officer and a prosecutor in an ambush in the country's cocaine-producing southern jungle, local authorities and the Interior Ministry said yesterday.

Rebels attacked a police vehicle carrying two men accused of drug trafficking as it crossed a bridge near the jungle town of San Francisco, some 580km southeast of Lima.

"The ambush seems to have been carried out by rebels working with drug traffickers. The wounded prosecutor was shot in the chest and the officer had his hands destroyed by a bullet," said Omar Quezada, president of the Ayacucho region, where San Francisco is located.

"We don't know what happened to the two detained men," he told Reuters, adding that the area was a drug trafficking region where coca, the raw material for cocaine is cultivated.

The interior ministry also said on Monday it had destroyed six cocaine laboratories in the area, preventing the production of around 140kg of the drug.

Peruvian Interior Minister Romulo Pizarro said it was too early to blame any particular group for the attack, but remnants of the Shining Path, which led one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies in the 1980s and 1990s, have claimed responsibility for similar attacks on police since June 2004.

Peru is the world's No. 2 cocaine producer after Colombia and the government says drug production is rising as Colombian and Mexican traffickers take advantage of Peru's lack of policing in remote, coca-growing areas.

- REUTERS