DEATH SQUADS MAY HAVE KILLED 33 COLOMBIAN CIVILIANS

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Suspected right-wing paramilitary gunmen killed at least
13 people and possibly up to 33 in twin attacks in two of Colombia's
northern provinces, police and local news media said Friday.

They said the bloodiest of the two attacks occurred in a sparsely populated
region of Cordoba province, near the main jungle stronghold of Carlos
Castano, Colombia's dreaded right-wing paramilitary warlord.

A terse police report on the attack said heavily armed gunmen in combat
fatigues pulled into a village in sport-utility vehicles late Wednesday and
rounded up nine suspected "guerrilla collaborators," including a teenaged boy.

The nine were then slaughtered with machetes and bursts of automatic
gunfire, it said.

The official police report added few details and stopped short of blaming
paramilitaries for the attack. A police spokesman conceded the killing had
all the hallmarks of those committed almost daily by Castano's United
Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, the country's leading paramilitary force.

A witness interviewed on local Caracol television, meanwhile, said the
killers wore trademark AUC armbands to distinguish themselves from members
of one the South American country's two main Marxist guerrilla groups.

Speaking haltingly and with his back to the camera to shield his identity,
the witness also insisted at least 29 villagers were killed in Wednesday's
attack and not just nine.

"There's another 25 or 20 bodies out there," he said, explaining the
attackers dumped most of their victims in thick jungle around the village
or in ditches along the road they drove off.

Police said they had no immediate proof the death toll surpassed nine, however.

In the other attack, which took place Thursday night, police said a
paramilitary death squad shot and killed four farm workers in the
banana-growing region Cienaga in Magdalena province.

Local and international human rights groups said the rightist death squads,
which are estimated to have up to 6,400 fighters, are responsible for most
of the peasant massacres and other atrocities committed in Colombia.

Rights groups also allege Castano and his private army operate with the
support of state security forces, in an increasingly dirty war against
guerrillas and suspected guerrilla sympathizers that has taken about 35,000
lives since 1990.

In a rare television interview broadcast by Caracol in March, the
gravel-voiced Castano said drug trafficking and drug traffickers probably
finance 70 per cent of his organization's operations.