By Luis Jaime Acosta
BOGOTA, March 18 (Reuters) – Explosions in cocaine labs near the border with Ecuador killed 14 people in January, Colombia’s Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday, when asked to clarify accusations by Colombian President Gustavo Petro that actions by Ecuador had resulted in more than two dozen deaths in the area.
Sanchez said Colombian and Ecuadorean authorities are together examining whether sovereignty has been violated and that a bomb found in Colombia seemed likely to belong to Ecuador’s armed forces.
Petro earlier this week had suggested that Ecuador had bombed Colombian territory, leaving behind 27 “charred” bodies, though he provided no further evidence or information.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa flatly denied the accusation, saying his country had bombed drug traffickers within its own territory and that the locations were hideouts for narco-terrorism groups of mostly Colombian origin. Ecuador’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Twelve people in border province Narino were killed on January 22, Sanchez said, when asked by journalists about the figure of 27 dead given by Petro.
“The information we have at this moment is that those people died after being burned alive. The site where they died was a cocaine laboratory, and the causes and who was behind it are under investigation. Two other people died under similar conditions at another site on January 24,” he said.
Ecuador on Sunday launched two weeks of major security operations in four provinces on or near the Pacific coast in a bid to beat back gang violence. It has repeatedly held operations on its Colombian border, a major hub for trafficking of drugs then smuggled north to the United States by sea.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta, writing by Julia Symmes Cobb)
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