Colombian government condemns 'crime against humanity' after bodies of men held for up to 13 years are found
Colombia's main rebel group has killed four of its longest-held captives, apparently during combat on Saturday between soldiers and guerrillas, the government has said. A fifth fled into the jungle and survived during what appears to have been a failed rescue attempt.
President Juan Manuel Santos called the killing of a soldier and three police officers "a crime against humanity" and dismissed any suggestion that Colombia's armed forces might be responsible.
"They were held hostage for between 12 and 13 years and wound up cruelly murdered," Santos said.
Juan Carlos Pinzon, the Colombian defence minister, announced the deaths and the escape of police sergeant Luis Alberto Erazo, 48, who had been held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the Farc) for nearly 12 years.
Pinzon said government troops had been in the area for 45 days chasing rebels and had intelligence the guerrillas might be holding police and soldiers as captives. No official explained the nature and reliability of that intelligence or whether the four died in a failed rescue mission.
Three were killed with shots to the head and one with two shots to the back, Santos told a community meeting in central Colombia.
Pinzon said the bodies were found together, with chains near them. Erazo fled into the jungle chased by three rebels who threw grenades, wounding him slightly in the face. Erazo emerged from hiding after dusk when he heard chainsaws cutting a clearing so helicopters could land.
It is the Farc's policy to kill its prisoners if rescue is attempted. The rebels frequently chain their captives.
The sister of one of the victims, 34-year-old police major Elkin Hernandez, was angry with the government. "The Farc are murderers for the manner in which they killed them and the government is equally a murderer. They had the possibility to get them out of there and they didn't," Margarita Hernandez told the Associated Press.
Former senator Luis Eladio Perez, who was freed by the Farc in February 2008 after six years, told AP he believed the four died in a failed rescue.
The bodies were found in the municipality of Solano in the southern state of Caqueta. Among them was the longest-held rebel captive, army sergeant major Jose Libio Martinez. He was seized by rebels on 21 December in an attack on a lonely southern mountain outpost called Patascoy.
Ingrid Betancourt, a Farc hostage freed in July 2008 by Colombian troops posing as international aid workers, said she had been "hit hard" by the news about the four with whom she had shared captivity for a time.
The killings leave the Farc holding about 16 security force members.
The Farc took up arms in 1964 and are Latin America's last remaining rebel army. They have suffered a series of military setbacks and record desertions in recent years, crowned by the 4 November killing by government forces of their leader, Alfonso Cano.
His successor, Timoleon Jimenez, was named the following day and few analysts believe defeat is imminent for the rebels, who draw their strength from landless peasants in a country where land ownership is concentrated in a few hands. The Farc are believed to comprise about 9,000 fighters.
The drug trafficking-funded rebels have periodically freed security force members and politicians as a goodwill gesture, stepping up releases in early 2007 with the intercession of the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.
Santos, who was defence minister for four years before winning the presidency, has publicly refused to entertain peace overtures, saying the rebels must first show themselves willing by freeing all captives.