8 councilors shot during meeting

Rebels burst into a hotel in southern Colombia where local government officials were meeting Monday and killed eight town councilors, authorities said.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels, disguised as police, arrived in a truck, walked into the hotel and opened fire while the officials were having a working lunch, said Gilberto Toro, head of the Colombian Federation of Municipalities.

President Alvaro Uribe condemned the attack, which he said killed eight councilors. Early police reports said seven were killed.

“The murders of the councilors fills us with heartfelt sadness,” Uribe said in a statement. “This fight against terrorism is hard.”

BUJUMBURA, Burundi

Official concedes killings, torture

Rogue soldiers and police officers in Burundi have executed and tortured suspected rebels and civilians, a government official acknowledged Monday. He said such cases are investigated and the guilty punished.

Presidential aide Philippe Nzobonariba was responding to a Human Rights Watch report that says that summary executions and torture have continued under the country’s newly elected government and the perpetrators go unpunished.

The report said that rebels from the National Liberation Forces also kill and abuse civilians, at times because the civilians refuse to donate money or food to the rebels.

Burundi is emerging from more than a decade of ethnic clashes between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis that left more than 250,000 people dead.

A series of peace deals led to democratic elections last year and the formation of a power-sharing government between members of the two communities.

The National Liberation Force remains the only rebel group that has not taken part in the peace deals.

JAKARTA, Indonesia

Official: Attacks funded by al-Qaida

Osama bin Laden’s terror network helped fund all the suicide bombings in Indonesia in recent years, a senior police official said today, highlighting links between al-Qaida and the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah.

Money for the attacks, which have occurred annually in the world’s most populous Muslim country since 2002, was delivered by courier to leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah, said Col. Petrus Reinhard Folose of Indonesia’s counterterrorism taskforce.

“It came from the head of al-Qaida,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an international terrorism conference, refusing to say if he meant bin Laden himself.

Indonesia is the only Southeast Asian nation known to have been hit by suicide bombers.

Jemaah Islamiyah is blamed for the 2002 nightclub attacks on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, attacks in the capital Jakarta in 2003 and 2004 that together killed 21, and triple suicide bombings on Bali last October that killed 20.

Compiled from wire reports