The non-commissioned officers and officers involved will also not be able to exercise “any type of operational direction or military intelligence mission”.
Ten soldiers suspected of having threatened villagers with their weapons in a rural area of northern Colombia, an incident described as “extremely serious” by the government, have been suspended, we learned this Thursday from an official source .
“As soon as it became aware of the facts, the army command (…) immediately took the necessary measures” by launching an investigation, the head of the Army said in a press release. of land, General Luis Mauricio Ospina.
“I made the decision to withdraw their confidence and responsibility to bear arms (…),” he added.
Frightened women and children
According to images broadcast at the beginning of the week on social networks and then relayed by the national press, soldiers with masked faces and wearing no identification badge threatened farmers with their weapons, including frightened women and children, in the rural town of Tierralta, in the department of Cordoba, a drug trafficking zone where several armed groups are active.
The government described the incident as “extremely serious”, while left-wing President Gustavo Petro strongly condemned it, seeing it as a possible “return to paramilitarism”, in reference to these far-right squadrons, allies in places to the army, who sowed terror in their fight against communist guerrillas in the early 2000s.
According to a local community leader, the soldiers intended to pose as members of the FARC dissidence, a guerrilla group that rejects the peace agreement signed in 2016 with this Marxist group.
On Thursday, President Petro again spoke vehemently on the subject. “No soldier should ever again lend himself to shooting a young boy and killing peasants. (…) Do not bring Colombia back to the past, to the barbarity of the past,” he warned.
Source: BFM TV
