The World - News from May 30, 1988

Conservative Colombian leader Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, twice a presidential candidate and an executive with the newspaper El Siglo, has been kidnaped, police said. A bodyguard was killed by gunmen, who escaped in a car they later blew up with a dynamite charge. Radio stations said that Gomez, 69, the son of former President Laureano Gomez, may have been wounded in the abduction. There was no claim of responsibility, but political observers said the kidnaping could have been carried out by left-wing guerrillas or by drug traffickers fighting extradition to the United States.