Sun, Jan 06, 2008 page1

• Boy found in foster care is Rojas' son, rebels say

  • AFP
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  Colombia's leftist rebels have confirmed that a boy in foster care in Bogota is the son of their hostage Clara Rojas and vowed their stalled hostage release would go ahead as planned, the Bolivarian News Agency said on its Web site.

  Quoting from a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) statement, the agency said on Friday that Emmanuel Rojas, whom the rebels earlier claimed was in their custody, was placed in foster care to protect him from anti-guerrilla operations and the constant displacements the rebels are forced to make.

  "That's why the boy, of a guerrilla father, was placed in Bogota under the care of honest people, while a humanitarian agreement was being signed," said the statement read by the Bolivarian News Agency, without specifying the accord.

  The statement, dated Jan. 2, came hours after Attorney General Mario Iguaran said DNA samples taken from the boy and relatives of Clara Rojas showed a "very high probability" that the three-year-old boy was indeed her son.

  The rebels' statement confirming that the boy in Bogota is Emmanuel appeared to give credit to President Alvaro Uribe's accusations last week that FARC had delayed its hostage release because it discovered the boy was not in their custody.

  The three-year-old boy, who was said to have been named Emmanuel, was born from an allegedly consensual relationship between Rojas and one of her captors.

  The FARC had promised after protracted negotiations to release the boy, his mother and former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez around Christmas time.

  But the rebels suspended the operation last Monday, alleging that the Colombian military had launched military operations in the jungle region where the handover was due to occur.

  In its latest statement, FARC accused Uribe's government of keeping Emmanuel "kidnapped in Bogota ... with the dark purpose of torpedoing his release" and that of his mother and Gonzalez to president Chavez.

  Despite these machinations, the rebels said, the release of Rojas and Gonzalez "will go ahead as planned, just as we proposed it to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."

  The rebels also repeated their demand that the government demilitarize two townships in southern Colombia where negotiations for a prisoner swap of some 45 rebel hostages for some 500 jailed guerrillas could take place.

  Uribe has consistently turned down the request, offering instead a much smaller area that the guerrillas did not accept.

  Uribe has denied there had been any anti-guerrilla military operations in the area where hostage release was to take place and said the rebel-born boy was in Bogota at a state-run orphanage of the Colombian Family Welfare Institute, and had been there since July 2006.

  The daily El Tiempo reported last week that a man named Jose Gomez, now under a witness protection program, told investigators he had received the little boy from FARC guerrillas in 2005.

  Gomez said the rebels threatened to kill him if he did not return the boy by Dec. 30, last year.

  The report said the child suffered health problems and that Gomez took him for treatment at a hospital, where staff suspected child abuse and transferred the boy to child protective services.

  Gomez tried to get the boy back ahead of the FARC deadline last month, but by then the case was already in the hands of the district attorney's office which was investigating, based on anonymous phone tips, whether the child was Emmanuel Rojas.
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