Necklace bomb may have started with dispute among neighbors

 BY TIM JOHNSON

 LA PALESTINA, Colombia -- The bomb clamped around the neck of Elvia Cortés
 was heavy, and choked her like an orthopedic collar. It contained three switches
 and little lights. Green and yellow tape bandaged the corners, and it smelled of
 glue.

 But despite the macabre circumstances, a bomb squad technician managed to
 banter with Cortés as he snipped tiny wires and cut through the plastic tubing
 with a band saw.

 The victim herself did not appear particularly distraught, suggesting aloud to a
 sister that it was probably a fake bomb.

 ``I don't think she knew she was going to die,'' police Maj. Edgar Humberto Torres
 said. ``She kept saying, `Why did they put this on me? I haven't done any harm to
 anyone.' ''

 Tragically, the 12-pound bomb was real. When it exploded later that day, May 15,
 it instantly blew the 53-year-old Cortés and the bomb squad technician to bits.
 Three soldiers were wounded, two of them losing their left hands.

 The blast sent a shock wave around Colombia. Never had such a brutal extortion
 attempt seared its way into the nation's spotlight. Kidnappers snatch eight people
 each day on the average in Colombia, mostly for ransom, but this was different,
 astonishingly so. Rigging a bomb around someone's neck for a measly $7,500
 made Colombians ponder aloud about the depths to which their country had sunk.

 ``I have seen a lot of people very, very demoralized since this event, really deeply
 affected,'' said Antanas Mockus, a mathematician and former mayor of Bogota.

 Echoing the accusations of senior military and police aides, President Andrés
 Pastrana laid blame on Colombia's largest insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed
 Forces of Colombia (FARC), and hastily suspended a round of peace talks with
 the rebels.
 
WIDE-RANGING IMPACT

 Since then, the criminal inquiry into the killing of Elvia Cortés has taken surprising
 turns. Authorities now dismiss the possibility that guerrillas were involved. Blame
 is falling elsewhere. The culprits may be of far lesser magnitude, but they were
 still capable of making Colombia's currency wobble, nearly derailing peace talks
 and provoking a level of outrage unusual in a nation so inured to violence.

 Mere mention of the ``necklace of terror'' these days reminds Colombians of the
 evil that floats around their country, the macabre forces that can pluck a
 seemingly innocent person and inflict on them a death so horrible that people
 recoil thinking about it.

 Terror could hardly have picked a more pastoral setting.

 Fields of ripe corn sway in the wind on the hillside where Elvia Cortés lived with
 her husband, Salomón Pachón. Sheep graze in grass so mossy it feels unreal. A
 distant lake shimmers despite an afternoon rainstorm.

 Like other neighbors, the couple raised corn and beans on a parcel of less than
 two acres. They owned six dairy cows.

 The couple kept to themselves, although Cortés had a friendly nature.

 According to police and judicial sources, the four assailants who arrived at the
 Cortés home before 5 a.m. on May 15, dressed entirely in black and wearing
 hoods, employed lethal precision in targeting their victim.

 First, they cut off electricity to her home. Then, they poisoned her small dog
 chained outside so it would not bark. They knew her precise schedule, and
 prepared for her to begin her predawn rounds.
 
'WAITING FOR HER'

 ``They knew that every morning she leaves at 5 with her pails to milk her cows,''
 said Cortés' younger sister, Maria del Carmen. ``They were waiting for her.''

 Once she opened the door, they burst inside and in the darkness clamped the
 bomb around her neck. One assailant demanded that her family pay 15 million
 pesos (about $7,500) within hours, or they would set off the bomb remotely. The
 assailants left behind a shoulder bag containing a toy gun and a taped message
 on a cassette.

 ``It's a philosophical message, like it's being read out of a book,'' police Detective
 Angelo Huertas said.

 The tape is now in protective judicial custody, but the Semana news weekly
 printed excerpts in which a voice talked about missile trajectories and an
 advanced type of rifle for sharpshooters.

 Once the assailants left, Cortés called her sister from a cellular phone and waited
 for a taxi to arrive from the nearby city of Chiquinquirá, five miles away, to pick her
 up. Apparently fearing the bomb would blow up, police refused to transport Cortés
 in their own cruiser. On police instructions, the taxi dropped Cortés along a
 deserted Chiquinquirá ring road and left her to wait for a bomb expert.
 
TECHNICIAN ARRIVES

 The bomb technician, Jairo Hernando López, didn't arrive until after 10 a.m.

 ``He didn't bring a single tool with him,'' said María del Carmen Cortés. ``He kept
 asking for a band saw. Then he asked for a penknife, and he heated up its blade
 in a candle.''

 When the bomb exploded at around 12:45 p.m., López had succeeded in
 removing what appeared to be one of four independent bombs with separate
 trigger mechanisms in the collar, police said. The sophistication of the bomb was
 one of the factors that confounded investigators immediately.

 Why would anyone go to such lengths to extort $7,500 -- a small amount by
 Colombian extortion demands -- from a poor rural farmer? Did they want the
 national, and even international, publicity that ensued?

 The first thought among many analysts was that someone sought to throw a
 wrench in the peace process, but doubts arose soon. The guerrillas generally
 don't bother the region, and the military seems an unlikely culprit.

 ``The [local army] colonel was at the scene,'' said a local prosecutor, who spoke
 on condition of anonymity. ``And he kissed the woman 10 seconds before the
 bomb went off to encourage her to stay strong. He could have been blown up.''
 
A NEIGHBOR'S REVENGE?

 Torres, the police chief, now believes it was an act of vengeance by a neighbor.

 Indeed, Prosecutor General Alfonso Gómez Méndez has announced in Bogotá,
 60 miles to the south, that a neighbor of Cortés has been arrested, although he
 declined to identify the person.

 María del Carmen Cortés, the victim's sister, invited a visitor into her second-floor
 apartment in Chiquinquirá and immediately voiced deep relief at the arrest. ``It
 was neither the FARC nor the military,'' she said.

 Before her sister was blown to bits, Cortés said, she whispered that she
 recognized the voice of one of her hooded assailants, the son of a neighbor.

 ``The neighbors are the ones who killed her,'' Cortés said, adding that a feud with
 one neighboring family had grown so intense that her sister had been the subject
 of a knife attack in a local market a month earlier.

 She said she believes that both the extortion demand and the cassette tape were
 designed to throw investigators off the path of a vengeance homicide.

 Huertas, the police detective, shares the perception that at least one of the
 assailants personally knew the victim, and may be a neighbor.

 ``Why else would they have worn hoods?'' he asked.
 
UNSOLVED MURDERS

 Quietly, other authorities mention unsolved murders of another neighborhood
 couple a few years back, and mention that the family under suspicion has sons
 with knowledge of electronics and chemistry, specialties needed for bomb
 construction.

 Still, the composition of the bomb puzzles authorities. An expert showed a visitor
 a schematic diagram of the bomb, which was made of sections of pipe, PVC
 tubing, a syringe containing acid, six batteries, a photocell sensitive to light, an
 electronic control panel, mechanical triggers and explosive compartments
 containing what he described as RDX.

 ``This is unreal. I've never seen a bomb like this in Colombia,'' he said, noting that
 he had been on a bomb squad for 15 years. ``It had a combination of triggers.
 . . . Look, there's a piece here that's been specially molded.''

 Torres, the police chief, looked pensive as he pondered the different theories
 about the bombing, measuring his words carefully as he once did during a stint in
 law school.

 He said he wasn't sure the bombing would ever be completely solved.

 ``This is a complete enigma,'' he said. ``There's been no other case like this in the
 country.''