Four dead and three injured reported by armed attack in the Colombian Pacific area

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BOGOTÁ (AP) — An armed attack in a city in the Colombian Pacific left at least four dead and three injured on Sunday, in an act that the police attributed to disputes between criminal gangs operating in the area.

Colonel Óscar Mauricio Rico, police commander of the department of Chocó, whose capital is Quibdó, indicated on the social network They found “four lifeless bodies.”

Three other people received first aid at a hospital, the colonel added.

The local police chief indicated that the attack “is due to internal disputes between criminal organizations,” without specifying their names, but he announced that initial investigations made it possible to determine the aliases of three suspects.

The authority asked the community for help to locate them and present them to the competent authorities.

Quibdó has been a focus of violence due to the confrontation between illegal armed groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces, with which other criminal structures are associated, according to authorities. The violence has caused the displacement and confinement of hundreds of people, amid requests from human rights defense organizations demanding government action.

All of this despite the fact that the High Commissioner for Peace undertook a peace program in that territory to dialogue with at least four violent organizations seeking to get some 500 members, especially young people, out of the conflict through intervention with social and cultural projects. as reported by that office.

At the end of February and as part of the peace talks, the government and the ELN met in Quibdó to listen to the demands of community leaders after a strike by that guerrilla that confined the population in the midst of its confrontation with other illegal groups. .