FAMILY OF 11 KILLED IN COLOMBIA

BOGOTA -- Gunmen killed a husband and wife and their nine children in
northern Colombia in the latest crime to shock a nation torn by horrifying
bloodshed, authorities said Wednesday.

The children, from six months to 14 years old, were shot dead and their
bodies were drenched with gasoline and set ablaze, police said.

The murders on Monday evening in a rural area of Bolivar, a town in
Santander province, were believed to have stemmed from a personal vendetta.
Regional police chief Gen. Tobias Duran said a manhunt was under way for
two gunmen spotted near the scene.

``According to some it seems to have been a family-style revenge killing,''
Jairo Montero, a local government human rights official, said.

He said he visited the scene of the crime on Tuesday and was sickened by
the savage manner in which Jesus and Agripina Patino Aguilar and their nine
children were slaughtered.

``I don't think there's any human being, if you could call it that, that's
savage enough to commit murders like this,'' he told local radio.

The 6-month-old baby boy was shot in the forehead and ``was left with his
little hands trying to protect his face,'' Montero said, adding that the
children's bodies were ``stacked up like logs'' before being set on fire.

Montero said police were investigating possible links between the Patino
killings and a murder in the same region of Bolivar about a month ago.
Police said they did not believe the murders were politically motivated.

The deaths occurred a few hours after a right-wing death squad killed at
least 21 people during a three-hour orgy of bloodshed in a remote village
in eastern Colombia.

President Ernesto Samper remarked Wednesday that it seemed as if ``a
monster of violence feeding on money from the drug trade'' had been set
loose in Colombia.

But Almudena Mazarrasa, head of the United Nations High Commission for
Human Rights in Colombia, blamed authorities for ignoring warnings that a
death squad was planning Monday's massacre in Puerto Alvira, in eastern
Meta province.

The river port is just a 15-minute helicopter flight from police and army
bases. But even after the parish priest raised the alarm, the military took
24 hours to get to the town.

``I'm talking of an omission by the authorities of this country who were
warned that this massacre was going to occur,'' Mazarrasa said. He was
speaking on the sidelines of a seminar on international organized crime in
Bogota.

Colombian rights groups and the International Committee of the Red Cross
said they had alerted the government and the military to the paramilitary
threats as long ago as October.

``This was a massacre foretold,'' said Jose Fernando Castro, Colombia's
Human Rights Ombudsman.

``We informed the government and the army...Everybody was aware of the
threat,'' Pierre Gassmann, head of the ICRC delegation in Colombia, told
the Noticiero Nacional TV news program.

Samper vowed to investigate whether the armed forces had been negligent.
The president launched an offensive on paramilitary groups late last year,
vowing to chase them ``to Hell and back,'' but massacres have continued
unabated.

A total of 563 people died in 114 mass killings across Colombia last year,
according to police statistics. Most were believed to be the work of
ultra-rightist paramilitary groups targeting leftists and suspected rebel
sympathizers.

Checked-by: Richard Lake