Colombia bomb blast kills 15 as police foil assassination plot

SUSPECTED rebels planned to assassinate Colombian President Alvaro Uribe with a huge bomb this weekend. But, when police discovered the device yesterday, the suspected rebels detonated it, killing 15 people and wounding dozens, authorities said.

The suspected rebels had planned to detonate the bomb, located in a house near the airport in the southern city of Neiva, as Uribe's plane passed overhead during a scheduled visit today , according to Hernando de Valenzuela, chief of the local prosecutor's office, and explosives experts at the scene. The plan was to blow Uribe's plane out of the sky as it passed overhead, the officials said.

But the suspected rebels detonated the bomb after authorities found out about the explosives and were raiding the house, authorities said. It was not immediately clear how police learned of the location of the explosives.

Sandra Tatiana de Serrato, an official with the state governor's office, said an investigator with the prosecutor's office and nine police officers including the chief of investigations for the Neiva police were among those killed.

The blast also wounded 30 people, destroyed five houses and severely damaged 30 others.

General Teodoro Campo, director of the Colombian National Police, said rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were behind the attack.

Campo said the suspected rebels had been plotting to use the bomb to attack an airplane, pointing out that the house lay along the flight path of planes approaching the airport. He did not comment on whether the target was Uribe's plane.

Uribe, who has survived several rebel assassination attempts, is launching a crackdown on the 38-year-old insurgency.

The FARC was allegedly behind the bombing of an exclusive sports and entertainment club in Bogota, the capital, last week that killed 35 people and injured more than 100. The powerful blast blew pieces of the car five blocks away.

Agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms helped

investigate the bombing, and determined the bomb was in a car parked in an interior garage. The explosive charge weighed 150-200 kilograms and was composed of a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel and TNT.