(Bogotá) A ten-year-old boy was killed Wednesday in a drone attack in southwest Colombia, the first death in the country from this type of attack, official sources said.
“The young Dylan, aged 10, was killed following the launching of grenades by drones targeting” soldiers in the Micay canyon, in the department of Cauca, said General Federico Mejía, military commander of the region, in a video published on the social network X.
This is the first death in a drone attack in Colombia, the Defense Ministry press service said, accusing a dissident faction of the FARC of being responsible for the attack.
In June, the army reported recording 17 drone attacks in six weeks, without any deaths, a modus operandi unprecedented in Colombia’s six decades of internal armed conflict.
The use of commercial drones to drop grenades or shells on Colombian security forces began to be reported this spring in southwest Colombia, in the strongholds of the Central General Staff (EMC), particularly the territories of the “Carlos Patiño Front”, a faction of FARC dissidents who reject the peace agreement signed in 2016 with this Marxist guerrilla group.
“Solidarity with the family of young Dylan” […]killed in a terrorist attack carried out by the criminal group Carlos Patiño in El Plateado,” Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez said on the X network.
“We are strengthening the military offensive to protect the population and capture those responsible for the attack,” added Mr. Velasquez.
Asked by AFP, a leader of the “Carlos Patiño Front” denied this version of events and blamed the army for the attack. “The Plateado community knows the truth, a local official denounced this attack,” the commander commented.