BOGOTA, Colombia — Grenade blasts, shootings and stabbings killed at least 88 people in Colombia's New Year's celebrations, police said Saturday as one of Latin America's most violent nations began 2000 much as it ended 1999.
In the most heinous incident, two people died and nine others were injured when unidentified attackers threw a grenade into a crowd at an open-air party in the town of Guadalupe, in northeast Santander province, a police spokesman said.
In a separate incident in the northwest city of Medellin, another man was killed and 17 other people, including four children, were hurt when attackers lobbed a grenade into a house.
At least 25 people were stabbed or shot to death in the capital, Bogota, as its 6 million inhabitants rang in the new year, a metropolitan police spokesman said.
The spokesman said that across the country 58 people were shot to death, 23 stabbed to death, four beaten to death in brawls and the three killed in grenade blasts.
Despite the grim new year toll, Gen. Luis Ernesto Gilibert said the number of violent deaths over the New Year's period was actually down 16 percent from last year.
Colombia has one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere. Last year, police reported more than 23,000 homicides in a nation of 40 million.
About 3,000 of those killings were politically motivated and took place in the context of a a long-running civil war that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in the last 10 years alone.