The leader of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group was killed Friday in a military raid, Colombian government officials said.

Alfonso Cano, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a Marxist-Socialist group that grew into a rebel force financed with income from drug trafficking and kidnapping, was killed in an air raid, the officials said. There were conflicting reports about whether other guerrillas were killed.

“The military has thus achieved one of its most important goals,” Alberto Gonzalez Mosquera, governor of Cauca Department in the country’s southwestern region, told a local radio station, according to The Associated Press. The area is near the location where the raid took place.

Mr. Cano, whose real name was Guillermo Saenz, was an intellectual who joined the party as a hard-liner after dabbling in radical university politics in Bogotá, the capital. In March 2006, the State Department indicted Mr. Cano and 49 other top FARC leaders on drug trafficking charges. It offered a $5 million reward for his capture.