Five police officers, three soldiers dead in Colombia (Roundup)

Sep 2, 2010, 18:52 GMT

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

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

Thursday's first incident happened in a rural area of the municipality of Salazar de las Palmas, Norte de Santander. According to the radio network Caracol, soldiers on patrol were attacked by rebels and a shootout followed. Two soldiers were killed.

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

In a separate incident, one soldier died and six were injured in an ambush by alleged FARC rebels against a patrol vehicle as it travelled through Ricaurte, Narino. One of the injured soldiers was in critical condition after suffering the loss of both legs in a bomb blast.

Both attacks 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.

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 its many remote jungle areas, allows them to escape security forces with relative ease.