BOGOTA, June 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A second person was charged with attempted assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe at the weekend, prosecutors said.
He accused of driving the vehicle used to deliver the gun to the 15-year-old suspected shooter, who is already in custody, the prosecutor’s office said.
Uribe, a 39-year-old conservative senator, was shot twice in the head and once in the leg while giving a speech in a park on Saturday in western Bogota.
He remains in critical condition but doctors said Wednesday he was showing signs of improvement.
The suspected hitman, who was captured near the scene by Uribe’s bodyguards after being shot and injured, said he acted “for money, for my family.”
At his arraignment this week, however, he pleaded not guilty to the attack.
The senator is a member of the Democratic Center party of former right-wing president Alvaro Uribe. The two men are not related.
Miguel Uribe is the son of Diana Turbay, a famed journalist who was killed after being kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel, and grandson of Julio Cesar Turbay, who led Colombia from 1978 to 1982.
The authorities believe the 15-year-old was a hired gun but it is not yet known who ordered the hit.
Petro has speculated the shooting was ordered by an international “mafia” or by dissident members of the defunct FARC guerrilla group who refused a 2016 peace deal.
Colombia is experiencing its biggest security crisis in a decade.
On Tuesday, the country was rocked by a string of 24 coordinated bomb and gun attacks that killed at least seven people across the southwest, where government forces are fighting FARC dissidents. — NNN-AGENCIES
