BOGOTA – The National Liberation Army, or ELN, claimed responsibility on Saturday for shooting down a military helicopter last Monday in the rural area of Teorama municipality in the northeastern province of Norte de Santander, where authorities had said the chopper was not shot down but that it had landed in a minefield and was destroyed in the resulting explosion.

The commander-in-chief of the Northwestern War Front of the armed group, alias “Manuel Perez Martinez,” denied the official version in a brief communique posted on Twitter, where he said that his men were the ones who brought the Black Hawk down.

“We shot the Black Hawk helicopter down, its code is EJC-185, and amid a deployment of government troops it was aiding the work of repairing the Caño Limon-Coveñas oil pipeline,” the text says.

The ELN, which has a substantial stronghold in that province, also said that after its attack it confirmed the deaths of “eight military men – a corporal and seven professional soldiers” and that six of the troops were injured.

The figure contradicts the number of deaths reported by the Defense Ministry after the incident, when it said that four of the men in uniform lost their lives.

According to a preliminary report that the ministry released in a communique, and that the ELN now denies, the explosives at the landing site were placed and detonated by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The helicopter was apparently headed for the Filo Guamo area, where technicians of state oil company Ecopetrol are working to repair a stretch of the Caño Limon-Coveñas pipeline, damaged the week before in a guerrilla attack.

Operating in that area bordering Venezuela are guerrillas of the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), which authorities say is chiefly engaged in drug trafficking.