Colombian army spots three US hostages

[David]

BOGOTA (AFP) - Colombia's army has located three US nationals in the hands of Marxist FARC rebels, but has not attempted a rescue, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said Monday.

"We have had very accurate information about the location of the (rebel) leaders, the hostages and the camps. Our people saw the three Americans bathing in the river, they even heard them speaking English," Santos told RCN radio.

He said US nationals Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves were spotted by military staff from the opposite bank of the Apaporis River at some location in the southeastern department of Guaviare.

The three Americans, contractors for the US State Department, fell into the FARC's hands in February 2003 when they were on a flight in the southern department of Caqueta and the rebels downed their plane.

Santos, who did not give a date of the sighting, said the troops did not attempt a rescue because the hostages moved and it was not possible to guarantee their safety.

He also said he could not confirm the presence in the area of other hostages such as Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.

On Sunday Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged Colombia's Marxist rebels to free all their hostages, arguing the time had come to wind up their decades-old guerrilla insurgency against the Colombian government.

"I believe that the time has come for the FARC to release all the people it has up in the mountains unconditionally. It would be a great humanitarian gesture," Chavez said on his weekly TV and radio show Sunday.

"Guerrilla wars have become history in Latin America," he said.

Critics often have accused the leftist Chavez of backing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia which has been fighting for more than four decades, but on Sunday he bluntly called their very existence into question.

"This far along in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of step, and that has to be said to the FARC," Chavez said.

His announcement caught the Colombian government by surprise with Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos saying: "If it's true and leads to something concrete, then it's a very good news."

Former Colombian hostage Luis Eladio Perez also told radio Caracol that it could soon lead to hostages being released.

And a Colombian senator who was also a mediator with the FARC, Piedad Cordoba, said Sunday she believed a release of hostages "is near."

Early this year, the FARC released six hostages to Chavez, but the Venezuelan leader said he had lost contact with the rebels after Colombia attacked a guerrilla camp in Ecuador in March, killing the group's second-in-command.

The FARC is holding some 750 hostages, including 39 high-profile hostages whom they want to swap for some 500 of their imprisoned comrades.

A top FARC leader Ivan Marquez meanwhile charged President Alvaro Uribe was the real terrorist saying he was trying to kill Chavez and Ecuador's President Rafael Correa.

"He has tried and continues to try to kill President Hugo Chavez," Marquez said in a statement run on the website of Agencia Boliviariana de Prensa (ABP).

Marquez further charged Colombia's secret police was trying to use hitmen to kill Correa "working with an Ecuadoran general with the surname Aguas."

Separately the Colombian defense chief confirmed there would be no US base built in Colombia, amid reports Washington might be considering it when its base in Ecuador is closed.

"There will be no base in Colombia. That has been ruled out. It has been ruled out by the United States and it has been ruled out by us," Santos told RCN.

"We already have discussed it with the Americans. There is none, and there will be none. Just that clearly and categorically."