Five police officers, two soldiers dead in Colombia

Sep 2, 2010, 16:42 GMT

Bogota - Five police officers and two soldiers are dead in Colombia after incidents blamed on leftist rebels.

The two soldiers were killed Thursday in clashes with alleged members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the Norte de Santander province, in northeastern Colombia, on the border with Venezuela.

The incident happened just a few hours after five police officers were killed and three others were injured in an ambush Wednesday in the municipality of El Doncello, in the southern Colombian province of Caqueta. The province's Interior Minister Edilberto Ramon Endo blamed the ambush on FARC.

In the incident on Thursday, another soldier was missing, according to media reports. According to the radio network Caracol, soldiers on patrol were attacked by rebels in a rural area of the municipality of Salazar de las Palmas, and a shootout followed.

Reinforcements were sent to the area to look for the missing soldier. Officials did not know if he had been kidnapped or was hiding.

The attacks were the first major incidents since conservative former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos was inaugurated as Colombian president last month.

During the eight-year presidency of Santos' mentor and predecessor Alvaro Uribe, FARC had been forced into a certain retreat in the four-decade-old conflict that intertwines politics and the drug trade.

In a country where almost half the population lives in poverty, however, the rebels continue to have a substantial amount of power, and the Colombian geography, with ita many remote jungle areas, allows them to escape security forces with relative ease.