Colombia Police Station Bombings Kill 7 Officers

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A wave of bombings carried out against police stations this weekend has rocked Colombia’s Caribbean coast, with three attacks within 24 hours killing seven officers and wounding dozens more.

The violence began in the early morning hours Saturday when two people on a motorcycle threw an explosive device into a police station in Barranquilla, a major port city gearing up for its annual carnival celebration in two weeks. Five police officers were killed in that attack, and at least 40 injured.

A second strike, in Santa Rosa del Sur, a rural area in Bolívar state, killed two officers and wounded a third shortly before midnight Saturday, according to a police statement.

Then, early Sunday, the Barranquilla police were hit with another bomb, this one at a small police station, which wounded four officers and three civilians. The police said the bomb had been left outside the station, but witnesses told El Heraldo, a local newspaper, that it had been tossed from a passing taxi.

The Barranquilla police have taken into custody one person they said was suspected of helping plan and execute the first attack.

The motive behind the bombings remained unclear. Officials have speculated that it could be retaliation by criminal groups for police raids. The authorities are working on the assumption that more attacks are planned, and have not discounted the possibility that all three attacks were carried out by the same criminal organization.

In the coastal region of Colombia where the attacks took place, there has been an increase in activity from a number of criminal groups that are looking to move into territory abandoned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The Marxist rebel army turned over its weapons in June after signing a peace deal with the government in November 2016.

Fundación Ideas Para La Paz, a Colombian research group that monitors conflicts in the region, reported last year that the Clan del Golfo, a drug trafficking organization with anti-insurgency routes, has been expanding its presence on the country’s Caribbean coast, as part of a nationwide push for territory.

But Colombia has also recently been hit by multiple attacks from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, a smaller leftist guerrilla group, which has launched a series of attacks against security forces and oil infrastructure. An urban ELN front has claimed responsibility for the first Barranquilla attack on their website, though Colombian authorities and the group’s commanders have not yet confirmed it.

The attacks against the police reminded many Colombians of the violence the country endured in the 1980s and early 1990s, when some 550 police officers were murdered under the orders of Pablo Escobar, the powerful drug lord.

“We haven’t seen so many dead police since the times of Escobar,” one Twitter user wrote.

President Juan Manuel Santos denounced the newest attacks as “cowardly and treacherous” while visiting wounded officers in Barranquilla later that day. “Terrorism, as in this case, will not break anyone.”