A sniper from Colombia’s largest rebel group, FARC, kills a soldier in a northern Colombia airport, local media reported on Tuesday.
According to the Colombian army’s 18th Brigade, the soldier was guarding the local Ituango airport in Colombia’s northwestern Antioquia department, when he was shot in the head by a FARC sniper.
The soldier was instantly killed, said the secretary of Antioquia’s government, Santiago Londoño.
The FARC’s 18th and 34th Fronts are known to be active in the Itanguo municipality. Insurgents frequently attacked the Ituango hydroelectrical dam project — the biggest in Colombian history — in 2012.
The sniper attack is the latest in the Antioquia department. The department incurred several guerrilla attacks since the FARC called off their two-month unilateral ceasefire on Sunday.
FARC on Tuesday intercepted a bus traveling from northern Antioquia to Colombia’s second largest city, Medellin. The rebels then loaded the bus with explosives and used it as a roadblock.
The governor of Antioquia, Sergio Fajardo Valderrama, on Monday said that the FARC should consider prolonging the unilateral truce.
“What I would think is that the FARC, which is in a process of negotiation with the government, [should] take the decision to prolong the truce, until these conversations end…and if the [results] are fortunate, like I want them to be, we will never again have this type of combat, these types of attacks,” said Fajardo.
The FARC has refused to continue the truce unless the government agrees to make it bilateral.
“With pain in our hearts…we return to the cycle of war,” chief FARC negotiator Ivan Marquez said on Sunday.
“It will return to the same situation as before the truce, which was a situation of indiscriminate attacks [with] many attacks against against infrastructure,” said Maria Victoria Llorente, the director of the conflict-mointoring NGO Fundacion Ideas Para la Paz.
The Colombian Antioquia department is home to the FARC’s northwestern “Ivan Rios” Bloc, a large fighting unit comprising close to 1,000 armed rebels and thousands of part-time insurgents active in militia networks. During 2012 the department was one of the most hard hit by the ongoing armed conflict.
