UN condemns Colombia massacre as war crime

THE United Nations yesterday condemned as a war crime the killing of 108 people in a Colombian church and said the government was partly to blame for the tragedy.

Battles still raged around the battered community of Bojayá where the 108, 45 of them children, died when a mortar bomb was lobbed into the church where they were seeking refuge from fighting between Marxist guerrillas of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and right-wing paramilitaries. The people of this small town, in the remote jungle province of Chocó, yesterday managed to recover their dead, using lulls in the fighting to pick up their loved ones.

"Some of the bodies were so ripped up it was practically impossible to identify them. Many are just body parts, some have heads which we were able to identify," said one horrified doctor who had gone in with a rescue helicopters to evacuate wounded. The doctor, who preferred not to give her name, sat in a hospital in Medellín, almost unable to put into words the carnage she had witnessed.