Bogota, Feb 22 (EFE).- Six FARC rebels, including one suspected of being involved in the massacre of 74 people nearly 10 years ago, died in an air strike on a guerrilla camp in northwestern Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos said Wednesday.
The air strike was "a good blow at the FARC," the president said in a Twitter posting.
"Six terrorists killed including alias 'Mapanao' responsible for the Bojaya massacre," Santos said in his posting, without providing additional details.
The joint operation was staged by the air force and the National Police in San Miguel, a village in the jungles outside Vigia del Fuerte, a military source in Bogota told Efe on condition of anonymity.
The air strike targeted a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrilla camp in Antioquia province near Bojaya, a town in neighboring Choco province that was the scene in early May 2002 of fighting between rebels and militiamen from the defunct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, militia federation.
Residents took shelter from the fighting inside a church that was hit by a gas cylinder packed with explosives, killing 74 people and wounding 53 others.
FARC rebel Pedro Alfonso Albarado Zabaleta, known as "Mapanao," was a member of the unit involved in the attack, considered one of the worst against civilians during the long-running conflict in Colombia.
Authorities have convicted 21 FARC members in connection with the massacre.
The FARC camp was the target of a "high-precision bombardment," the military source said.
The FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.
The Colombian government has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in U.S. aid for counterinsurgency operations.
The FARC has suffered a series of setbacks in recent years at the hands of the Colombian security forces.
Alfonso Cano, the FARC's top leader, was killed on Nov. 4 in a military and police operation that the government hailed as the biggest blow to the FARC in its nearly 50-year history.
Cano, a 63-year-old intellectual who had entered the ranks of the FARC 30 years ago, was killed in in a remote area of the southwestern province of Cauca a few hours after fleeing a bombardment.
The FARC also suffered a series of blows in 2008, with the biggest coming in July of that year, when the Colombian army rescued a group of high-profile rebel-held captives: former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, U.S. military contractors Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, and 11 other Colombian police officers and soldiers.
The FARC is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC's main means of financing its operations.
