Three Colombia police killed in blast amid renewed protests
Three police officers have been killed in an attack on a police station in southwestern Colombia as thousands gathered for renewed protests in the country’s capital of Bogota.
Local sources said the fatalities took place in a bomb detonated in the city of Santander de Quilichao in the southwestern province of Cauca late on Friday. Seven civilians had also been injured.
"It was an attack on the police station with cylinders placed on a ramp that sadly leaves us three dead and seven wounded at the moment," city secretary Jaime Asprilla told AFP.
The official did not attribute the blast to any armed groups.
Thousands of people marched in Bogota's Bolivar Plazaon on Friday to express growing discontent with President Ivan Duque's government and his plans for economic reforms and a lack of government action to stop corruption and the purported murder of human rights activists.
The protesters, among them families and elderly people, were abruptly dispersed using tear gas.
Reports said several supermarkets in the south of the capital city were looted as protesters, many masked, burned items in the street and blocked roads.
Three people had been killed and dozens wounded a day earlier as more than 250,000 people marched in a national strike in the capital.
Also on Friday, the Colombian president promised a “national conversation” on social policies after massive demonstrations against his right-wing government caused the casualties.
Duque added that dialogue would "permit us to close social gaps, fight corruption more effectively and build, between all of us, peace with legality."
The protests have coincided with demonstrations elsewhere in Latin America, from anti-austerity marches in Chile, to protests over vote-tampering allegations in Bolivia that led President Evo Morales to resign, and inflamed tensions in Ecuador and crisis-hit Nicaragua.
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