BOGOTA, March 18 (Reuters) - Explosions in cocaine labs near the border with Ecuador killed 14 people in January, Colombia’s Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday, when asked to clarify accusations by Colombian President Gustavo Petro that actions by Ecuador had resulted in more than two dozen deaths in the area.
Sanchez said Colombian and Ecuadorean authorities are together examining whether sovereignty has been violated and that a bomb found in Colombia seemed likely to belong to Ecuador’s armed forces.
Petro earlier this week had suggested that Ecuador had bombed Colombian territory, leaving behind 27 “charred” bodies, though he provided no further evidence or information.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa flatly denied the accusation, saying his country had bombed drug traffickers within its own territory and that the locations were hideouts for narco-terrorism groups of mostly Colombian origin.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta, writing by Julia Symmes Cobb)
