===============================
Asked who might want to kill
Landazabal, army commander Gen.
Hugo Galan said: "Subversives
could be behind this and groups
of private justice could also
be behind it."
===============================
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, 12 May 1998


Ex-Colombia Defense Minister Slain
----------------------------------

By Frank Bajak

BOGOTA -- Gunmen killed a former defense minister and conservative 
political activist with three shots to the head today as he walked alone to 
his office.

Retired Gen. Fernando Landazabal Reyes, 76, was a half block from his 
Bogota apartment when two men in a red car pulled up and shot him. The car 
was abandoned several blocks away and exchanged for another, police said. 

''The general was on the way to his office alone, as was his daily routine, 
when he was surprised,'' Bogota police commander Gen. Argemiro Serna said 
as Landazabal's body lay nearby, covered in a white sheet on a rain-
dampened sidewalk.

A neighbor and longtime friend said she heard four shots shortly before 8 
a.m.

In 1984, President Belisario Betancur fired Landazabal from the defense 
minister's post for publicly opposing peace talks with leftist rebels. 
Landazabal was currently an adviser to presidential candidate Harold 
Bedoya, also a hard-line former armed forces commander. 

Landazabal ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and was briefly a member of 
the Conservative Party leadership but was best known for insisting while 
defense minister that guerrillas would take advantage of peace talks to 
increase their numbers, which later proved true. 

Asked who might want to kill Landazabal, army commander Gen. Hugo Galan 
said: ''Subversives could be behind this and groups of private justice could 
also be behind it.''

Last month, former Communist Party activist Maria Arango and human 
rights lawyer Eduardo Umana were slain. Authorities suspect right-wing 
paramilitary death squads in their killings. 

Copyright 1998 Associated Press