Remains of 105 victims of right-wing paramilitaries were found in the southern jungles of Colombia, the biggest such discovery in the country's four-decade-old guerrilla war, officials said yesterday.
More remains are expected to be found near the 65 graves uncovered late Friday in Putumayo province on the Ecuadorean border.
A total of 211 bodies have been recovered from the province since last year, but Friday's find by agents from Colombia's attorney general's office marked the most number of bodies found in a single area.
More than 31,000 paramilitaries have disarmed since 2003 under a deal promising reduced jail terms to those who cooperate with investigations into crimes they committed in the name of fighting Marxist rebels.
Both the "paras" and the rebels are funded by Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade and are branded terrorists by Washington.
"We are horrified at this cruelty driven by the insatiable lust for land" used for the production of cocaine, Interior Minister Carlos Holguin said in announcing the discovery of the graves.
The paramilitaries were organised in the 1980s by rich Colombians to fight the rebels. By the late 1990s the conflict had turned into little more than a turf war over drug smuggling routes.
Colombia is the world's biggest producer of cocaine despite billions of dollars in US aid, under a program called Plan Colombia, meant to fight narcotics