Miguel Uribe, the rightwing Colombian presidential candidate who was shot at a campaign event in Bogotá on Saturday, has made it through emergency surgery but is still fighting for his life, according to his wife.
Uribe, a 39-year-old senator for the opposition conservative Democratic Centre party and an outspoken critic of Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, was attacked as he hosted the event in a public park in the Fontibón neighbourhood of the Colombian capital.
Images from the scene showed Uribe, who is running for the presidency in 2026, slumped against the bonnet of a white car, smeared with blood, as a group of men tried to hold him and stop the bleeding.
Uribe was airlifted to a hospital in Bogotá in a critical condition but “overcame the first surgical procedure”, the city’s mayor, Carlos Fernando Galán, told the media.
His wife, María Claudia Tarazona, said her husband had “come out well from the surgery”, but that he was still desperately ill.
“He fought the first battle and fought it well,” she said. “He is fighting for his life.”
A security guard managed to detain the suspected attacker, who is believed to be 15. The head of the national police, Carlos Fernando Triana, said the suspect was injured in the struggle and was receiving treatment.
Two other people – a man and a woman – were also wounded, and a Glock-style pistol was seized.
The motive for the attack is not yet known, but Colombia’s defence minister, Pedro Arnulfo Sánchez, vowed that the military, police and intelligence services would deploy all their capabilities to find out what happened. Sánchez also offered a 3bn peso (£540,000) reward for information leading to the identification and capture of those responsible for the attack.
Petro offered his sympathies to Uribe’s family and said Colombia was thinking of him.
“I hope Miguel Uribe survives,” said the president. “That’s what I want above all else and that’s what society should feel as we join our hearts and our energy so that he’ll be OK.”
Petro later confirmed in a speech on Saturday night that the person arrested was a minor and that the investigation would focus on finding who had ordered the attack.
“For now, there is nothing more than hypothesis,” he said, adding that failures in security protocols would also be looked into.
The Spanish government condemned the assassination attempt. “Violence has no place in our societies,” it said. “Spain sends its wishes for a speedy recovery to the victim, to all his family and friends, and to the Colombian people.”
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also condemned the attack, but said it was the result of what he termed “violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government”.
Petro and Donald Trump have recently clashed over the US migrant deportation flights that pushed the two countries to the brink of a trade war.
Uribe is from a prominent family. His grandfather, Julio César Turbay Ayala, served as Colombia’s president from 1978 to 1982, his father was a businessman and union leader and his mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a rescue operation after being kidnapped in 1990 by an armed group under the command of the cartel leader Pablo Escobar. Her story featured in Gabriel García Márquez’s 1996 nonfiction book News of a Kidnapping.
Reuters and AFP contributed to this report.
