Police captured a top rebel commander who was allegedly recruiting youths to carry out suicide attacks against President Alvaro Uribe and other officials, Colombia’s secret police chief said Wednesday. Luis Hipolito Ospina, a senior member of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was arrested Tuesday in the capital, Bogota, said Jorge Noguera. He said Ospina, who reportedly speaks Arabic, German and English and has traveled extensively abroad, was trying to indoctrinate 22 youths as suicide commandos. "He was preparing young people to kill themselves ... including in possible attacks against the president," Noguera told reporters. Noguera said there was no evidence that Ospina or the FARC had developed ties to Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida.
Television footage released by the secret police showed a bearded Ospina, sporting a pony tail and looking disheveled and tired while being escorted in handcuffs by police to a jail cell. Ospina, who apparently has converted to Islam, is believed to have joined the FARC in the late 1980s as an explosives expert and grew close to the group’s seven-member ruling secretariat.
| If they're into explosives, you usually find them hanging around mosques... |
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