Colombia: seven years in prison for minor who shot Senator Miguel Uribe

The 15-year-old who shot at senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe in June, and who died in mid-August, was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in a juvenile detention center, prosecutors said.

Uribe, from the opposition Democratic Center party, died Aug. 11 from head wounds after a brutal gun attack at a political rally in Bogotá, reviving memories of Colombia’s worst years of political violence. Five presidential hopefuls were gunned down in the second half of the 20th century. In all, eight candidates have been assassinated in the nation’s political history.

"Deprived of liberty in a specialized care center"

The young man "must remain seven years deprived of liberty in a specialized care center," the prosecutor's office said Wednesday in a statement.

He will not be moved to an adult prison when he turns 18, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office told AFP. The teenager was tried in a special juvenile court on charges of attempted homicide and illegal weapons possession.

Under Colombian law, charges cannot be modified once accepted by a minor, so he was tried for attempted murder rather than homicide.

Uribe's death

The 39-year-old opposition legislator spent two months in intensive care at a Bogotá hospital, where he underwent multiple surgeries before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been one of leftist President Gustavo Petro’s strongest critics.

Videos captured the June 7 attack during a rally in a park in a working-class neighborhood of the capital. After the shots rang out, amid the confusion and screams of the crowd of about one hundred, the bloodied candidate collapsed.

The teenager shot him three times, twice in the head and once in the leg. Uribe’s bodyguards wounded him as he tried to flee on foot through an alley near the scene of the attack.