Bogota, Feb 3 (EFE).- A wave of bomb attacks this week attributed to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrilla group left 18 dead and 77 injured in different parts of the Andean nation.
In the wake of the terrorist incidents, President Juan Manuel Santos and Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon rearranged their schedules and traveled Thursday to Tumaco, site of the deadliest bombing.
In that southwestern port city, a bicycle-bomb that detonated Wednesday afternoon outside a police station killed 11 police officers and civilians and left 61 others injured.
The other two attacks took place Thursday in Villa Rica, a town in the southwestern province of Cauca where six were killed and 12 wounded; and in Cajamarca, a town in the central province of Tolima where a woman was killed and four were hurt.
"We condemn, as the international community and all Colombians should condemn, these demented terrorist acts that the FARC are committing," said Santos, who labeled the insurgents "hypocrites" for talking of peace while carrying out attacks.
Santos also announced the arrest of two people allegedly involved in the Tumaco attack, as well as rewards totaling 1.6 billion pesos ($890,000) for information leading to the capture of the perpetrators.
Pinzon attributed the bombing attack in Tumaco, a Pacific coast city in Nariño province, which borders Ecuador, to an "alliance" of the FARC and Los Rastrojos, a drug-trafficking gang and successor group to once-powerful, far-right paramilitaries.
Nariño Government Secretary Pedro Vicente Obando, for his part, told Efe that the situation in the port city is "really terrible" and that "the entire population is affected."
In an attack Thursday also attributed to the FARC, assailants detonated a pickup truck-bomb outside a police station in the southwestern Colombian town of Villa Rica, Cauca province.
Three civilians and three police officers were killed in that bombing, including the station commander, and 12 others were wounded, Cauca Gov. Temistocles Ortega told Efe.
"We don't know who may be responsible," said Ortega, who called on the rebel groups to "cease these demented attacks against the civilian population of Cauca," where the FARC has a strong presence.
But Pinzon, speaking from Tumaco, said it was "clear" that the FARC, which has fought a succession of Colombian governments for nearly 50 years and is the oldest insurgent group in the Americas, also was behind the terror attack in Villa Rica.
The FARC "is an organization dedicated to drug trafficking, dedicated to terrorism and dedicated to killing the civilian population," the defense minister said.
The minister also said another blast occurred Thursday at a hotel in Cajamarca, where a bomb was planted by a man who had just checked out after a three-day stay.
The blast killed a woman who worked as a cook at the hotel's restaurant and injured four guests, including an employee of a mining company with operations in the area, the secretary of the Tolima provincial government, Disraeli Labrador Forero, told Efe.
Elsewhere, a FARC ambush of a police motorcycle patrol in Remedios, a town in the northwestern province of Antioquia, left one officer dead and another wounded.
