REBELS SLAY THREE COLOMBIANS SEEKING HOSTAGE RELEASE

ZIPACON, Colombia -- A Colombian senator and two companions who were trying
to negotiate the release of rebel hostages were shot in the head and
killed, apparently by the rebels, police said yesterday.

The bodies of Sen. Martha Catalina Daniels; her driver, Carlos Lozano; and
Ana Maria Medina were found Saturday in a deep ravine outside Zipacon, 35
miles north of Bogota, Mayor Bernardo Gonzalez said. They were identified
yesterday morning.

"I think that these people were killed somewhere else and brought here on
Friday night," police Col. Alvaro Sandoval said.

On Friday evening, the group left the senator's home in Bogota without
taking along her bodyguards, Gonzalez said.

Medina was the wife of a local politician who is being held hostage by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The three were trying to
win the freedom of Medina's husband and a former mayor who were kidnapped
in May, the Colombian intelligence agency said.

Daniels was the seventh Congress member to be killed in four years, said
Carlos Garcia Orjuela, president of the Colombian Congress. Five other
lawmakers and a presidential candidate are being held hostage by the rebels.

Daniels had said the FARC had threatened her because of her husband's
involvement in a corruption scandal. Her husband, Hernando Rodriguez, is in
jail, accused of mishandling a pension fund that paid workers thousands of
dollars inappropriately.

Daniels also was well-known for her defense of former president Ernesto
Samper, who in 1995 was accused of receiving campaign funds from drug
traffickers. Congress absolved Samper of wrongdoing.

Daniels was a member of the opposition Liberal Party. She had served 12
years in Congress and was not running for re-election in elections next week.

Her slaying comes amid a wave of violence that began when President Andres
Pastrana broke off peace talks with the FARC and ordered a military
offensive against the rebels.

The president was retaliating for the hijacking of an airliner and the
kidnapping of a senator on Feb. 20.

Since then, the rebels have launched attacks on infrastructure that have
left much of the country without electricity and parts without water or
telephone services.

Also yesterday, police restarted after three years U.S.- backed counterdrug
operations in a former rebel safe haven yesterday, spraying a field of
heroin poppies in the Andean mountains.

Authorities say FARC has allowed drug crops to multiply in the zone, which
the government ceded to the leftist rebels three years ago.

The spraying was the first since the FARC lost control of the zone. Such
anti-drug operations had continued in other parts of Colombia.

Before the demilitarized zone was created, 125 acres in the region were
devoted to heroin poppies. Today, 875 acres inside the zone and an
additional 175 on the outskirts are planted in poppies, said Gen. Gustavo
Socha, chief of the anti-drug police.

The area devoted to coca, the base for cocaine, has doubled to 37,500 acres.