Stray bullets a killer in Colombian holiday season

Dec 30, 2011, 8:38 GMT

Bogota - Shooting real bullets into the air is a worrying Christmas season tradition in troubled Colombia, and it is hardly amusing: over 700 people have been killed and close to 2,000 have been injured by stray bullets in the past 10 years.

Access to firearms is relatively widespread in a country which has for many decades been ravaged by violence, whether by powerful drug cartels or extreme-left rebels and extreme-right paramilitaries fighting the authorities.

So shooting actual bullets is, for some, part of a dangerous Christmas ritual that also includes firecrackers and fireworks.

On Christmas night this year, another case shook public opinion in the South American country. A 9-year-old boy was hit in the head by a bullet as he tried to show his neighbourhood friends the present he had paradoxically got for Christmas: a toy gun.

Within seconds, the boy collapsed to the ground, just a few metres away from his home in central Bogota. He was immediately taken to La Misericordia Hospital, where he fought for his life for four days, but died Wednesday.

The authorities continued to look Thursday for the person who shot the bullet that killed the boy, and Bogota Police offered a reward of around 2,300 dollars for information leading to that person's arrest.

Scores of other people were injured in recent days in various Colombian cities, the victims of more alcohol-fuelled stray bullets.

Research by the Colombian Resource Centre for Conflict Analysys (CERAC) showed that stray bullets do the most damage in Bogota, Medellin, Cali and Barranquilla, the country's four-largest cities.

The results of the study are particularly alarming in their estimate that stray bullets have killed, on average, one person per week this year in Colombia, with over a third of all victims being minors.

Using ballistics, the authorities managed to arrest in March the suspect in the December 31, 2010, fatal shooting of a seven-year-old boy. The boy had been hit in the head by a stray bullet in Soacha, south of Bogota.