12 July,2011 11:17 AM IST | | IANS
Two soldiers were wounded when suspected members of the leftist FARC guerrilla group set off a bomb planted on a horse in a jungle area in southern Colombia, officials said
The bomb exploded while the soldiers were on patrol Sunday in Las Damas, a rural area outside the city of Cartagena del Chaira.
The soldiers were hit by shrapnel from the bomb planted on the horse by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas, Caqueta province government secretary Edilberto Ramon Endo said.
Members of the FARC's Patino Company staged the attack on the soldiers, Endo said.
Bad weather delayed the evacuation of the wounded soldiers.
The FARC staged a series of attacks over the weekend in Cauca, a province in southwestern Colombia, killing six people and wounding 60 others.
The FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.
The Colombian government has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in US aid for counterinsurgency operations.
The FARC is on both the US and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC's main means of financing its operations.
