Colombian hostages freed, six guerrillas killed

Three oil-sector contractors kidnapped in southern Colombia on 30 January were abandoned by their captors the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on 31 January after these were pursued by the army and plain-clothes agents, Caracol radio reported, citing army declarations. The head of the Army's Sixth Brigade General Germán Giraldo told Caracol on 31 January that the FARC left the two engineers and a topographer in the locality of Fragüita in the southern Caquetá department, apparently to maintain their own mobility. President Juan Manuel Santos said that day speaking in Cartagena de Indias, that authorities had information that two policemen believed kidnapped by the FARC on 25 January were alive, and efforts were underway to rescue them. He said the FARC were mistaken if they believed they could pressure the state into ending its military actions with kidnappings, and vowed Colombia would end its war with the FARC "one way or another," the broadcaster Caracol reported. He thus rejected again the FARC's calls for a bilateral ceasefire; Colombia did not accept he said, proposals to "regulate this war or humanize it," or any "transaction." The Defence Ministry also confirmed an earlier Air-Force communiqué on the deaths at an unspecified date of a FARC chieftain and five guerrillas during bombardments in north-western Colombia. The Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón told Caracol radio that one of the dead was identified as Juan Carlos Arango - Jacobo Arango - the commander of the FARC's Fifth Front and Northwestern Block. He was killed when the Air Force bombarded a camp in the Nudo de Paramillo locality in the department of Antióquia. Police and navy personnel separately caught on 31 January two suspects provisionally identified as extortionists for the FARC; they were found with explosives in the south-western district of Tumaco, the Defence Ministry stated.