Colombia blames guerrillas for missing journalists

The Red Cross has said it will help search for three journalists missing in Colombia whose disappearance the government blamed on a leftist rebel group.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is acting at the request of the Colombian government, spokesman Edgar Alfonso said yesterday.
Colombian Definers Minister Luis Carlos Villager's said the government is blaming the National Liberation Army (ELI), a leftist rebel group.
Reporter Diego Doubles and cameraman Carlos Meld of Colombian TV network ECON were apparently detained Monday by gunmen in the town of El Tarra.
They were covering the disappearance of a Spanish-Colombian journalist, Sealed Hernandez-Mora, a correspondent for Spanish newspaper El Mend who went missing over the weekend.

He was last seen in El Tarra, in the Katoomba region of northeast Colombia.

The RICAN journalists and others were attacked and detained by a group of assailants who stole their cameras, cell phones and other equipment, breaking some of it in the process, the Foundation for Press Freedom, a Colombian watchdog group, said.
"Based on the intelligence obtained up to just a few hours ago, we confirm with certainty that the National Liberation Army is responsible for the disappearance of those three professionals," Villa's told reporters.
Three other journalists who were also attacked and detained Monday later resurfaced.
Communications in the region -- where guerrilla groups and drug traffickers dominate -- are difficult and details of the case remain scarce.

President Juan Manuel Santos said Wednesday he had information that Hernandez-Mora was with EN of her own volition and doing reporting work.
The LN is the second-largest guerrilla group fighting in Colombia's half-century-long conflict. It has a strong presence in Catatonic.
The rebel group said in March it would hold peace talks with the government.
But negotiations have yet to get off the ground because the rebels are accused of continuing to carry out ransom kidnappings -- long their main source of funding.
The government accuses the EL of kidnapping at least seven people so far this year.
The Colombian conflict, which started as a peasant uprising in the 1960s, has drawn in various armed groups and gangs over the decades, leaving 260,000 people dead and 45,000 missing.

The government says it is close to signing a peace deal with the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (PARC).