US support of Colombia FARC attack confirmed

Monday 24 March 2008

A top Colombian official admitted the March 1 attack on a Farc rebel camp inside Ecuador had been supported by US intelligence, but not US smart weapons. (Report: J. Fanciulli, A. Roy)

  
Colombia's March 1 attack on a rebel camp inside Ecuador was supported by US intelligence but did not use US bombs, a top Colombian official told AFP on Sunday, confirming widespread speculation.
  
"We didn't use smart weapons from the United States, we took some of the intelligence that country provided us and put it to use in our own arsenal, which ... is quite sophisticated," said the Defense Ministry official who asked not to be identified.
  
"We're winning the war on the FARC (rebels) thanks to the United States, who now shares information it previously withheld," the official added in what amounted to Colombia's first admission it used US intelligence in the attack.
  
Colombia's cross-border raid killed more than 20 people, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC) second-in-command. But it also triggered a diplomatic row that saw Ecuadoran and Venezuelan troops mass at Colombia's border.
  
Tension subsided a week later with a handshake between the presidents of Colombia and Ecuador, but the leftist regimes of Quito and also Caracas -- which took Ecuador's side in the row -- insisted the attack had been carried out by US smart bombs.
  
After the attack, Colombia said it used ten conventional bombs fired from five Brazilian-made Super Tucano turboprop, light attack warplanes and three US-made A-37 jet fighters.
  
The defense ministry official said US help "was restricted to providing key intelligence directly to Colombian police, whose director (General Oscar Naranjo) is totally trusted by Washington."
  
Ecuadoran newspapers, however, said the Ecuadoran air force found that Colombia used ten 500-pound (227-kilogram) bombs, similar to those used by US forces in Iraq, which "cannot be transported by Colombian airplanes."
  
Ecuadoran authorities also noted that a few hours before the Colombian bombing raid, an HC-130 military aircraft had taken off from the US air base at Manta, in southeastern Ecuador.
  
The leftist FARC claim the raid was carried out by the US Southern Command and "their Colombian underlings."
  
Colombia's former deputy armed forces commander Nestor Ramirez said the attack could only have been carried out by Colombia's Super Tucano planes, since their ordnance have three guided systems that puts them within 30 centimeters (one foot) of the target.