A horrific attack in Bogotá

AT 9:30AM ON January 17th, José Aldemar Rojas arrived at General Santander police academy in Bogotá in a car packed with 80kg of explosives. He drove through a cargo entrance and headed towards the heart of the compound. Details are still emerging, but it seems that when policemen tried to stop him, he reversed and crashed into the women’s dormitory. The resulting explosion killed at least 21 people, including Mr Rojas, and injured 68 more.

The attack on Colombia’s capital brings back memories of the worst moments of the country’s long wars against leftist insurgent groups and against Pablo Escobar, a drug-trafficking kingpin. In 1989 he ordered the bombing of a building that then housed Colombia’s intelligence agency, killing 52 people and injuring 1,000. The last big terrorist attack in Bogotá was in 2003 when the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, detonated a bomb that killed 36 people at a private members’ club. But Escobar is dead and the FARC disarmed in 2017 under a peace agreement signed by Colombia’s then-president, Juan Manuel Santos. Bogotanos thought they had seen the end of large-scale urban terrorism.