COLOMBIA: Two Roman Catholic priests were killed in Colombia in a mountain ambush by suspected Farc rebels on Monday in an attack likely to cause widespread revulsion in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.
Police said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc)detonated a bomb when a car carrying the priests drove down a mountain road and then opened fire with assault rifles.
Two workmen accompanying Fr Vicente Rozo Bayona and Fr Ramon Emilio Mora were also killed in the attack in Norte de Santander province in the country's northwest near the border with Venezuela.
Farc claims to respect the Catholic Church, which has sometimes mediated in the country's four-decade-old insurgent war. But at least 60 Catholic priests have been killed by the rebels or by far-right paramilitaries in Colombia in the past 10 years, according to official figures.
In 2002 suspected rebels killed the archbishop of Cali, Isaias Duarte Cancino.
Thousands of people are killed in fighting in the country every year, and both the left-wing rebels and the right-wing paramilitaries fund themselves through the cocaine trade. - (Reuters)