A Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla fighter suspected of being responsible for a 2017 bombing in Bogota that killed three people, including a Frenchwoman, was arrested on Saturday, the Defense Ministry said.
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Violeta
, ELN terrorist, was arrested in northern Colombia, accused of being responsible for the bombing of the Andino shopping center that left three dead and nine injured in 2017", Defense Minister Diego Molano said on Twitter.
Memorial in tribute to Julie Huynh, who was a student at the University of Paris Est Créteil.
LP/LF
Violeta Arango was arrested in the municipality of Morales, in the department of Bolivar, during a military and police operation carried out at dawn on Saturday, the minister said without giving further details.
The explosion that occurred on June 17, 2017 in the toilets of the Andino shopping center killed three women, two Colombians aged 31 and 41 and a Frenchwoman, Julie Huynh, whose mother, visiting the country, was injured in the attack. .
The 23-year-old woman had been a volunteer for the NGO "Projeter sans frontières" since February and worked with young people displaced by Colombia's half-century-long armed conflict.
She was also a student in the Paris region.
Half a century of armed conflict in Colombia
A peace agreement was signed in November 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc, Marxist) and negotiations were then underway with the Guevarist ELN.
They were broken in 2019 after a bomb attack on a military school in Bogota.
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The two guerrillas immediately condemned the attack, saying they suspected opponents of the peace process of being the instigators.
The anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor's office had opened a flagrant investigation for "assassinations and attempted assassinations in connection with a terrorist enterprise", a classic procedure due to the presence of French nationals among the victims.