Charges In American's Death
Authorities said Friday they have arrested 57 alleged members of a gang that carried out last year's kidnapping of a group of oil workers in Ecuador in which an American hostage was killed.
Fifty of the suspects, including an alleged ringleader described as a former Colombian guerrilla, were arrested in different regions of the country on Friday, Colombian National Police chief Gen. Ernesto Gilibert told a news conference in Bogota.
The other seven are Ecuadorans captured in their country, he added.
Gillibert identified the alleged ringleader as Gerardo Herrera, and said he is a former member of a small Colombian guerrilla faction known as the People's Liberation Army, or EPL.
The U.S. government has requested that Colombia extradite four of its detained nationals, chief prosecutor Alfonso Gomez said. Gomez said he was not sure whether Herrera was one of the four.
Gilibert said the group was believed responsible for at least eight separate kidnappings in Ecuador since 1990, primarily targeting foreigners.
In the latest case, ten foreign oil workers were kidnapped Oct. 12 from an oil camp in the Pompeya jungle region of Ecuador, about 45 miles south of the border with Colombia. Two French captives escaped a few days later.
At the end of January, amid tense and secret ransom negotiations, the body of one of one American hostages — Ronald Sander, 54, an employee of Tulsa, Okla., oil company Helmerich & Payne, Inc. — was found on a jungle road.
Sander, of Sunrise Beach, Mo., had been shot five times in the back and was covered in a white sheet scrawled with the words in Spanish: "I am a gringo. For nonpayment of ransom. HP company."
The remaining seven hostages — including four other Americans, a Chilean, an Argentine and a New Zealander — were freed in March, reportedly after a $13 million ransom was paid for their release.
The abductions were at first blamed on one of Colombia's main leftist rebel groups, the FARC, which has waged a decades-long war against the government. But officials soon found that criminals with no identifiable political cause had nabbed the workers.
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