Bogota, Colombia – Colombian police on Friday captured a leftist rebel chieftain blamed for the deaths of dozens of members of the security forces and for some 300 attacks on oil and gas pipelines, authorities said.
Gen. Oscar Naranjo said that Rigoberto Jecanamijoy Noa, of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was apprehended in a rural area near Puerto Asis in the southern border province of Putumayo.
The general described the captured guerrilla as an explosives expert who had taken part in attacks on pipelines and in ambushes that claimed the lives of soldiers and police in the region.
He said the apprehension was the fruit of six months of investigation by the police and other agencies.
Over the years, the FARC has mounted hundreds of attacks on the trans-Andean pipeline, which carries crude oil 306 kilometers (190 miles) from the Orito oilfields in Putumayo to the Pacific port of Tumaco.
The insurgents’ usual tactic has been to place multiple dynamite charges along a stretch of the conduit and detonate them simultaneously.
