Colombia’s Vice President Francia Marquez said her security team found a “high-powered” nail bomb placed on the way to her home.
Colombia’s Vice President Francia Marquez on Tuesday said her security team foiled a plot to assassinate her with a roadside bomb. The discovery comes days after President Gustavo Petro announced a major truce in the country’s decades-long armed conflict.
The device was discovered on the road leading to the Marquez family home in the village of Yolombo on Monday, the vice president wrote in a Twitter post. She added that law enforcement officers carried out controlled destruction of the device as soon as it was found.
Marquez posted photos of the device, along with a police report that said it contained between 7 and 9 kilograms of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, compounds that, when mixed together create a powerful explosive called ammonal . The package also contains “dust and shrapnel,” stated report.
My protective gear integration is an item with an additional 7 kg of explosives on the path to my familiar residence in the reality of Yolombo, in Suarez, Cauca. El mismo fuel destroys control of SIJIN’s personal explosion-proof person. pic.twitter.com/gUpYQVOffD
– Francia Márquez Mina (@FranciaMarquezM) January 10, 2023
A former environmental activist, Marquez survived an assassination attempt when gunmen opened fire on a meeting she attended in 2019.
Marquez was elected alongside veteran leftist guerrilla Gustavo Petro in June, with the pair heading Colombia’s first leftist government. On New Year’s Eve, the Petro announced an armistice between the government and five major armed groups.
These groups, along with dozens of others, have been fighting for political power and control of cocaine production since the mid-1960s in a conflict that has claimed the lives of about 450,000 people, according to one report. report was published last July by a government-appointed truth committee.
It remains unclear who was behind the plot to bomb Marquez.
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