Colombia rebels blamed for attack on civilians

BOGOTA (Reuters) -- Marxist rebels, who suspended peace talks with the government earlier this week, killed up to 15 civilians in the latest round of political bloodletting across Colombia, authorities said Saturday.

Army spokesmen said the civilians were gunned down by rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in an attack Friday night in Frontino, a town located along a major arms and drug smuggling route in northwest Antioquia province.

The victims, numbering between 12 and 15, were all thought to be former members of a small guerrilla group -- the Maoist-inspired People's Liberation Army -- whose forces laid down their arms several years ago and since had been accused by rebels of supporting right-wing paramilitary groups, the army spokesmen in Bogota said.

They said their sketchy information about the attack was based on preliminary reports from an army patrol sent into Frontino early Saturday.

The FARC, Latin America's largest and oldest rebel army, staged a major attack in Dabeiba, a town near Frontino, late last month, killing more than 50 security force members and dealing the military one of its most humiliating defeats in years.

Both towns are located along a strategic highway linking central Colombia to the Caribbean coast near the Andean nation's porous border with Panama.

The highway, which ends in the steamy port of Turbo, has long been considered one of Colombia's most important corridors for black market traffic in weapons and cocaine.

The latest attack followed Tuesday's decision by the FARC to indefinitely break off slow-moving peace talks with the government of President Andres Pastrana, who it accused of failing to halt killings by ultra-right paramilitary death squads targeting leftists and suspected guerrilla sympathizers.

The talks, formally launched in January last year, were aimed at reaching a negotiated settlement of a conflict that has taken 35,000 lives since 1990.

In other developments, the army said two soldiers and at least six FARC fighters had died in fighting raging since Friday night in the central coffee-growing province of Risaralda.

The army did not elaborate on the situation in and around a town called Pueblo Rico. But both sides in Colombia's long-running war routinely exaggerate enemy casualties while minimizing their own.

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