“Tonight, a new explosive device was thrown into a crowd of people… unfortunately leaving three dead and at least nine wounded,” mayor Carlos Fernando Galan said in a statement on social media platform X shortly before midnight yesterday.

“This new attack, like previous ones in the same area, is a reaction of criminal gangs seeking to survive the sustained siege of the Bogota police on their structures in the San Bernardo neighbourhood,” Galan said.

The mayor also said he had ordered Bogota police to “intensify pressure” on local gangs and “capture their leaders”.

The grenade attack was in response to a conflict between “two local organised criminal groups” that are fighting over turf, Bogota police commander Giovanni Cristancho told reporters near the scene.

The capital’s central San Bernardo neighbourhood, traditionally a furniture manufacturing area, has become the site of drug trafficking and consumption in recent years.

Many unhoused people and drug users gather there.

A homeless person was killed and seven others were wounded by another grenade explosion in the same neighbourhood three weeks ago.