7 Killed, 7 Injured as Gunmen Shatter Medellin Cease-Fire
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BOGOTA, Colombia — Gunmen wearing military uniforms shot seven people to death and wounded seven others in the first mass killing for several months in Colombia’s drug center of Medellin, police said Sunday.
The assailants, driving in two black jeeps, fired indiscriminately at a group of mainly young people standing in a street in the poor Medellin area of Florencia on Saturday night, police said.
Police said the attackers wore army uniforms, often used for disguise by guerrillas and criminals.
Seven people, between ages 17 and 30, were killed, and seven others were being treated for bullet wounds in a hospital, police said.
Medellin, about 160 miles northwest of the capital Bogota, is the base of Colombia’s biggest cocaine cartel. It is the country’s most violent city, with about 400 murders a month.
Indiscriminate killings multiplied in Medellin slums earlier this year at the height of a drug war between powerful cocaine traffickers and the state.
But the massacres stopped after drug traffickers declared a unilateral truce in the drug war July 27.
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