COLOMBIAN ARCHBISHOP KILLED 'BY HIRED GUNS'

AN outspoken Colombian archbishop was shot dead at the weekend as he
left a church service in a murder that has all the hallmarks of a
contract killing.

Two men were waiting outside the Catholic church in a poor
neighbourhood of Cali where Mgr Isaias Duarte, 63, had just conducted
a group wedding service for 100 couples on Saturday.

The men, described as teenagers, were on a motorcycle. When Mgr Duarte
left the church, the pillion passenger got off, walked calmly up to
the archbishop and shot him twice at point blank range, in the head
and chest.

The men escaped on the motorcycle. The archbishop was taken to
hospital but pronounced dead on arrival. Mgr Duarte had a long list of
potential enemies, from Left-wing rebels to drug lords.

As the country suffers under a wave of attacks by Marxist guerrillas
after the breakdown of peace talks last month, police were quick to pin
the blame on the rebels.

"We believe this was the work of the subversives, but we never had
first-hand information that he had received threats," said police
General Heliodoro Alfonso Roa.

But Father Gersain Paz, spokesman for the archbishop's office in Cali,
said: "The priest of Buen Pastor [the church where the archbishop was
killed] saw the suspects at 4pm. He called the police and asked for
security to be reinforced. I don't know why they did not provide
sufficient security, which left him to die without any
protection."

Colombia's rebels might have had reason to want to kill the
archbishop, as he had been an outspoken critic of their methods.

He excommunicated a part of the country's second largest rebel group,
the National Liberation Army (ELN), after 150 guerrillas burst into a
church service in May 1999 and kidnapped 150 worshippers, including
the priest.

Mgr Duarte might have provoked the hatred of the larger Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), after he was mentioned in
affectionate terms in the biography of their most hated enemy, the
Right-wing paramilitary warlord, Carlos Castano.

Mgr Duarte's most recent controversy came last month when he denounced
some candidates standing for Congress in the elections that were held
on March 10. He said that they were financed by drug
traffickers.

But if a corrupt politician was aiming to silence the archbishop it
has backfired. There have been new calls to investigate the claims and
Armando Estrada Villa, the interior minister, wants the prosecutor
general's office to take on the case.

Condemnation of the killing was immediate and strong. "This is so
serious that the whole country has to react after this sacrilegious
murder," said the presidential candidate Noemi Sanin.

Pope John Paul II described Mgr Duarte as "brave in preaching the
gospel". During an address in St Peter's Square in the Vatican, he
said: "I urge Colombians once again to follow the way of dialogue,
excluding violence, blackmail and kidnapping of people, and to firmly
commit themselves to what are the true roads of peace."