The director of the Legal Medicine Institute, Ariel Cortés, stated this Thursday that there is no record of 27 charred bodies between the Colombian departments of Nariño and Putumayo (south), on the border with Ecuador, as suggested by Colombian President Gustavo Petro amid a diplomatic controversy with the neighboring country. "We monitor homicide information in the country daily, and at this moment, in the departments of Nariño and Putumayo, we have no report of 27 bodies that have been presented in these days," Cortés said during an interview with Caracol Radio. According to him, the only cases documented so far this year correspond to two incidents that occurred in January, in which 14 charred bodies were recovered on the Colombian side of the border. According to the official, twelve of those victims were found in the hamlet of Inda Zabalete inside a cocaine lab that caught fire, while the other two bodies were found in the hamlet of Pital, in the municipality of Mosquera. All were men, and according to the Legal Medicine Institute, there were no minors among the deceased. "We determined it was the result of a fire; here it was not from shrapnel or from a bombing," he stated, while clarifying that the state of calcination of the bodies made it impossible to determine if the victims were wearing items associated with illegal armed groups. Colombia and Ecuador are in tension after an unexploded bomb appeared on Colombian territory, about 200 meters from the border line, this past Tuesday. Petro stated that day during a televised ministerial council that "they are bombing us from Ecuador" and that there were "27 charred bodies," although Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa rejected these accusations and maintained that his country's military operations were carried out within Ecuadorian territory. Both countries agreed on Wednesday during a virtual meeting to create a binational technical commission to verify on-site how the bomb got there.
