They search for a lawyer in his office in Bogotá and shot him in the forehead

The city of Popayán is shaken by the murder in Bogotá of Andrés Felipe Varona, a lawyer and social communicator from the capital of the department of Cauca, the son of an important local columnist and former official of the Government's Ministry of Health.

Among the residents of the Normandy neighborhood, in the Bogota town of Engativá, the Varona case caused an impact due to the cruelty that the attackers showed towards him. According to what the security cameras near the lawyer's office, located right next to Notary 76, show, the homicide was meticulously calculated.

The record shows a person who walked naturally in the sector on March 29 in the afternoon, discreetly and with his face covered. Within seconds he entered the office, where Varona was reviewing cases. Upon locating him, he gunned him in the forehead and shot him without a word, killing him instantly.

The lawyer's secretary was the only one who saw the attacker enter and leave the office, located on Boyacá Avenue and Calle 51. However, he was late in realizing that his boss had been shot because the firearm used had a silencer. When he saw the pool of blood, he called the police.

For the same reason, passers-by in the area only realized that there was a homicide when the authorities arrived to lift the body of Varona, who was 36 years old. As it was a very crowded sector, according to neighbors, the sound of the gunshot would have helped to alert the community and arrest the murderer quickly.

According to the newspaper Q'Hubo, the Police unofficially revealed that the lawyer had no enemies or judicial record, so the first hypothesis they have about Varona's death is retaliation for a case he was taking, for which a hit man would have been hired.

According to figures presented by the Ministry of Security, Coexistence and Justice of Bogotá in its February 2022 bulletin, homicide in the capital has decreased compared to the previous months and the same period in 2021.

In February there were a total of 62 homicides in the city, while in January there were 78 homicides and 93 in December. In February 2021, the figure had risen to 77. In total, 134 homicides occurred between January and February.

The towns in Bogotá where the most homicides occurred in 2022 are Ciudad Bolivar (22 cases), Kennedy (15 cases), Rafael Uribe Uribe (14 cases) and Bosa (12 cases).

Secretariat figures also indicate that the most homicides occur on Saturdays (21.6 per cent) and Sundays (25.4 per cent), and that homicides occur most at night (38.8 per cent) and at dawn (28.4 per cent).

This year, the Mayor's Office of Bogotá has the challenge of reducing the homicide rate with which it closed 2021, which turned out to be the highest after five years of downward trend.

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