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Death squad kills at least 36 Colombians

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- A right-wing death squad killed at least 36 people in one of the worst attacks in years on civilians in Colombia's increasingly brutal conflict, authorities said on Friday.

The toll from a raid by paramilitary gunmen on a small fishing community in northern Colombia was still uncertain nine days after it occurred, however, with one report indicating as many as 86 peasants may have been killed.

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The bloodletting began at dawn on November 22 when men in combat fatigues and brandishing automatic assault rifles stormed into the small town of Nueva Venecia, on the Caribbean coast, and began calling out the names of townspeople on a "hit list" of alleged collaborators of Marxist rebels operating in the area, police said.

At least 17 people were shot on sight, execution-style, in front of their neighbors, police said.

But bullet-riddled bodies have been turning up in the bay and marshlands around Nueva Venecia ever since the initial death toll was reported. And a spokesman for the chief prosecutor's office in the nearby port city of Santa Marta told Reuters, in a telephone interview Friday, that the number of dead had risen to at least 36.

National human rights ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes visited the town Friday, and was expected to issue an official report before the weekend on the worst peasant massacre in Colombia in at least three years.

In a preliminary report issued late Thursday, however, Cifuentes said accounts from townspeople in the area spoke of 46 dead and more than 40 people missing since the attack.

Nueva Venecia is in the heart of a fishing and banana-producing region where communist-led rebels and ultra-right paramilitary groups have long battled for territorial control.

Cifuentes said 2,000 people had fled the town since the attack by suspected members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Colombia's leading paramilitary force.

Local and international human rights groups blame the AUC, commanded by feared warlord Carlos Castano, for most of the peasant massacres and other atrocities committed in a war that has taken 35,000 lives since 1990.

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