(Reuters) – Forty-five Colombian soldiers held in a drug trafficking area in the country’s west were released, the Colombian army said on Monday, putting an end to latest in a string of such incidents the government blames on rebels who reject a 2016 peace deal.
Colombia’s air force retrieved the soldiers “without incident” and all were returned “safe and sound,” the third division of Colombia’s army said on X.
Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez had reported late on Sunday that the soldiers were being held by some 600 people in El Tambo, in Colombia’s western mountainous Cauca department.
Seizures of soldiers, often by local communities who the government says are pressured by rebels, are not uncommon, and recent incidents have ended in soldiers being released unharmed.
“The kidnapping of the troops constitutes a serious violation of human rights and international humanitarian law,” the army division wrote on X.
Sanchez on Sunday blamed rebels commanded by a dissident known as Ivan Mordisco and demanded the soldiers’ immediate release.
Colombia’s six-decade-long internal armed conflict between the government, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers has killed more than 450,000 people.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta in Bogota, Deisy Buitrago in Caracas and Stefanie Eschenbacher in Mexico City; Editing by William Maclean and Julia Symmes Cobb)
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