By Luis Jaime Acosta
BOGOTA (Reuters) -Colombian police have captured a fugitive accused of planning last month’s gun attack on Senator Miguel Uribe, a potential presidential candidate, the head of the country’s national police said on Saturday, marking the fifth arrest in the case.
Elder Jose Arteaga, known as El Costeno, was arrested on suspicion of organizing and coordinating the politician’s shooting at a rally in Colombia’s capital Bogota on June 7 to commit the crime, police said.
This includes handing over the gun used in the attack to the 15-year-old charged with shooting Uribe, the police added.
“We are going after the intellectual authors of this act,” National Police Director Carlos Fernando Triana told a press conference,” adding that Arteaga had a criminal history going back more than 20 years.
Footage on social media showed armed officers cuffing the suspect during a morning raid on a house police said was in a western neighborhood of Bogota, a day after Triana announced that Interpol had issued a red notice for his arrest.
Reuters was not immediately able to reach Arteaga, 41, for comment.
Triana said in a post on social media on Friday that he was wanted for “aggravated attempted homicide; manufacture, trafficking and carrying of firearms or ammunition; and use of minors for the commission of crimes.”
On Saturday, Triana told reporters police were investigating several theories about who was intellectually responsible for the attack, without giving more details.
There is reward of up to 3 billion pesos (over $750,000) for information leading to the identification and capture of those responsible, Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a post on X.
Sanchez added that the United States, United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates were helping investigate the crime, which he said operated under a “model of criminal outsourcing.”
Uribe — a 39-year-old presidential pre-candidate for the conservative opposition Democratic Center party — was shot twice in the head and once in his left leg, according to state prosecutors. He has undergone several serious surgeries since the attack, which left him in critical condition.
Four other suspects have since been arrested, including the 15-year-old alleged shooter who was detained minutes after the attack. In a video of event, independently verified by Reuters, he can be heard shouting that he had been hired by a local drug dealer.
Uribe comes from a prominent political family.
His grandfather, Julio Cesar Turbay, was president from 1978 to 1982, and his mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 in a botched rescue attempt after being kidnapped by an armed group led by drug lord Pablo Escobar.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta and Vivian Sequera; Writing by Sarah Morland; Editing by Diane Craft and Alistair Bell)
