12-year-old boy killed while carrying package bomb toward police station in Colombia

Package bomb kills 12-year-old boy in Colombia

BOGOTA — A package bomb killed a 12-year-old boy who may have been given it to take to a police station after school in Colombia’s turbulent, coca-growing southwest, authorities said Friday.

The boy, still in his school uniform, died about 4 p.m. Thursday in the blast, which also injured two officers at the police station in the town of El Charco, authorities said.

Narino state Gov. Antonio Navarro said the bomb exploded as the boy approached the station.

It was not known who gave the boy the package, which was estimated to contain about 10 kilos (22 pounds) of explosives, or how it was detonated, the local judicial police chief, Bairon Javier Botina, told The Associated Press by phone. All that remained of the boy were his legs, he said.

The top security official in El Charco, Cristiano Pinillo, told the AP that “it’s possible the boy was used to deliver the parcel to the station,” adding that no such thing had ever happened in the town of 29,000 people.

A drug-trafficking right-wing criminal gang called Los Rastrojos and leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, operate in the remote region, where people live off fishing and farming, including coca, the basis of cocaine.

Colombia’s armed forces commander, Gen. Freddy Padilla, called the act repugnant as it “violated every norm of international humanitarian law.”

Interior Minister Fabio Valencia offered a $53,000 reward for information leading to those responsible.

The boy died a day after a car bomb set off in the administrative center of Buenaventura, Colombia’s main Pacific port in the adjacent state of Valle del Cauca, killed nine people and injured 36. There was no claim of responsibility.

Such bombings have been rare in recent years owing in large part to President Alvaro Uribe’s offensive against the FARC, which has pushed Colombia’s long-running conflict to remote regions.

However, critics of Uribe, who was barred by a court last month from running for a third consecutive four-year term, accuse him of doing little to constrain violent drug gangs in the provinces.