Iván Velásquez, the defence minister, added that a full investigation was under way and the culprits would be brought to justice.

Supported by US military aid, the Colombian armed forces are among the best armed in South America, with the country both the world’s largest producer of coca – the key ingredient in cocaine – and the scene of a bitter internal conflict between various groups of Marxist rebels and security forces.

Lasting some five decades, that conflict has cost an estimated 450,000 lives and displaced millions of civilians, mainly from impoverished rural areas.

That violence subsided thanks to controversial peace accords brokered in 2016 by then president Juan Manuel Santos with the main rebel group, the FARC. But it has recently ramped up again in the southwest of the country, near the lawless borders with Ecuador and Peru, as dissident FARC members refuse to lay down their arms.

Throughout the conflict, members of the Colombian armed forces have frequently been accused of human rights abuses and corruption. Mr Santos’s predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, faces trial for witness tampering for allegedly covering up his links to far-Right paramilitary groups that were also fighting the FARC.

According to the inspections, nearly one million bullets and 10,000 grenades had gone missing from Tolemaida. In La Guajira, more than four million bullets, 9,300 grenades, 550 rocket-propelled grenades, 37 Nimrod missiles and two Spike missiles were unaccounted for.