A detour on the road. That was the genesis of the pitched battle in which two Atlético Nacional clubs clashed on Saturday, which, according to the National Police, have an old rivalry.
They are the Purslane Nation, from Bogotá, and Los del Sur, from Medellín, who fought with machetes and daggers on the road between Chía and Cota (Cundinamarca), leaving 5 people injured. One of those involved, whom security cameras captured savagely beating another young man who had fallen on the floor of a gas station, was sent to jail.
Colprensa and EL COLOMBIANO reconstructed what happened, consulting judicial sources and sources from the area where the situation took place.
In this context, it transpired that -since the enmity between the two bars is already in the public domain- each of their caravans had a police escort and had to travel different routes on their way to Tunja, where they were going to accompany the match of their team against Patriots.
However, a detour, the cause of which is not entirely clear, caused the 15 buses that mobilized the Los del Sur bar from Medellín to end up meeting the 12 buses that carried those from the Verdolaga Nation from Bogotá. And that’s where the fight broke out.
The calculation made by the Police is that some 800 young people participated in the dispute.
“We were going to Tunja in the variant for Cota. I felt that a lot of stones began to fall against us. Many fans of the Purslane Nation were waiting for us in the street to kill us,” Cristian Alejandro Gómez, one of the injured and whose testimony was key to prosecuting Kevin Esneider Quintero, the only one who is in prison and charged with attempted murder, told the Prosecutor’s Office. of homicide.
However, his defense argues that he was not the one carrying the knife and should not be investigated for attempted murder, but for personal injury. Cristian is the young man who appeared in one of the videos circulating on networks and who – after getting entangled with a hose at a gas station – falls to the ground. It is at that moment that he ends up being beaten by the people from the opposite bar.
And, according to the medical report, in addition to the beatings, he suffered stab wounds and had to be transferred to the Chía Clinic, from where he gave his testimony.
A security control judge from Tenjo (Cundinamarca) imposed Quintero – who is exposed to a four-year prison sentence – as a detention measure and ordered his transfer to La Modelo prison in Bogotá.
The version of the members of the Purslane Nation bar is the opposite of Cristian’s. According to them, they were the ones from the Los del Sur bar, the ones who were waiting for them.
They assure that the barra from Antioquia territory had already made a first attempt to attack them at the southern entrance of Cota, which they managed to evade, but they could not avoid the second due to the high vehicular flow in the area.
Although witnesses in the area affirmed that the young people had previously met to confront each other (which would explain why they appeared armed with machetes), the Police discard this hypothesis and assure that everything was simply due to this apparently fortuitous encounter.
