Bogota – Two soldiers were killed and seven others wounded Tuesday when they stepped on a mine planted by leftist rebels on a rural stretch of highway in the southwestern Colombian province of Cauca, the army said.
A peasant in a nearby village also lost his life when rebels opened fire from ambush on the soldiers, said Col. Juan Pablo Amaya, the commander of the army brigade stationed in Popayan, the provincial capital.
Amaya said in a communique that the mines had been planted on a highway outside the town of El Bordo.
He said that the seven troopers wounded in the blast were transported to medical facilities in El Bordo and Popayan and were declared by doctors to be “out of danger.”
“After this barbarous act occurred, the troops were harassed by indiscriminate fire, including toward the civilian population in the village … where a peasant was killed,” said Amaya, who attributed the attack to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest insurgency.
On Monday, army troops killed a rebel who was planting landmines in the northwestern province of Antioquia, officials said.
Soldiers from a brigade based in Medellin, the capital of Antioquia, surprised the guerrilla at a place called El Roblal.
The dead rebel “was carrying a Browning pistol, four antipersonnel mines, 10 meters of detonating cord and documents that will be analyzed by military intelligence,” an army spokesman said.
Army explosives experts, meanwhile, deactivated 10 landmines in a field in a rural section of nearby San Francisco municipality.
More Colombians, many of them children playing in rural fields, are killed or wounded by landmines every year than in any other nation.
Landmines have been planted in 31 of Colombia’s 32 provinces, according to a recent U.N. report.
Up to 100,000 of the devices are estimated to have been planted around the Andean nation, the great majority of them by leftist rebels seeking to inflict casualties on soldiers and protect coca plantations that supply their extensive drug trafficking operations.
