One of a dozen provincial lawmakers kidnapped by the country’s main rebel group a decade ago has been arrested for allegedly helping the insurgents plan the daring daylight abduction.
Colombians were stunned on Thursday by the arrest of Sigifredo Lopez, 48, on suspicion of murder, treachery and hostage-taking. The news was especially alarming because he was the only one among the 12 who escaped execution by rebels in 2007 under circumstances that remain unclear.
Authorities have not mentioned a possible motive.
‘MIRACLE’
Lopez has said he survived because he was at a different but nearby location when the rebels committed the killings, mistakenly confusing for a military patrol another rebel group that neared the camp without notification.
Rebels of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had standing orders to kill their hostages rather than allow them to be rescued.
Lopez has said he was held by himself for the next two years until February 2009, when he became the last politician freed by FARC.
He said at the time that he owned his survival “to a miracle of God.”
“I hope that there is some confusion, or this is a mistake,” Diego Quintero, the brother of one of the slain deputies, said on Thursday.
He said he was led to believe from comments in a proof-of-life video of his brother, Alberto Quintero, that his brother and Lopez were never held together.
Lopez was arrested in Colombia’s third-largest city of Cali, where he and the others were seized in 2002 from the provincial assembly building by rebels disguised as security force members.
Officials in Colombia’s chief prosecutor’s office said Lopez had helped the FARC plan the mass kidnapping.
They said various former guerrillas had provided testimony that Lopez participated. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make public statements.
VIDEO
One official said prosecutors had video of a man believed to be Lopez offering detailed instructions on how to perpetrate the crime.
In the video, the man’s face is not fully visible in the video, but his voice can be heard, according to the radio station La FM.
It said the video came from computers seized in November when the military killed the rebels’ top leader, Alfonso Cano.
La FM said the man appearing in the video explains where each deputy would be, the hours they came and went and where the building’s security cameras were located, adding that none of the deputies carried weapons.
Lopez unsuccessfully ran for Colombia’s Senate and Cali’s mayor’s office last year on the Liberal Party ticket.
The party’s chief, Simon Gaviria, called the accusations against Lopez “macabre” and said he would ask the party’s ethics committee to suspend Lopez.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS