A grenade attack by a local gang in Colombia’s capital late Wednesday killed three people and wounded nine, Bogota’s mayor said, weeks after a similar attack in the same neighborhood.
“Tonight, a new explosive device was thrown into a crowd of people… unfortunately leaving three dead and at least nine wounded,” Mayor Carlos Fernando Galan said in a statement on social media platform X shortly before midnight (0500 GMT) Wednesday.
“This new attack, like previous ones in the same area, is a reaction of criminal gangs seeking to survive the sustained siege of the Bogota police on their structures in the San Bernardo neighborhood,” Galan said.
The mayor also said he had ordered Bogota police to “intensify pressure” on local gangs and “capture their leaders.”
The grenade attack was in response to a conflict between “two local organized criminal groups” that are fighting over turf, Bogota police commander Giovanni Cristancho told reporters near the scene.
The capital’s central San Bernardo neighborhood, traditionally a furniture manufacturing area, has become the site of drug trafficking and consumption in recent years. Many unhoused people and drug users gather there.
A homeless person was killed and seven others were wounded by another grenade explosion in the same neighborhood three weeks ago.
AFP
