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BOGOTA - Left-wing Colombian guerrillas will surrender the bodies of 11 kidnapped local lawmakers over the weekend, President Alvaro Uribe said, after two months of bitter speculation over how the men were killed.
A dispute over the deaths and the hand-over of their bodies has stoked tensions even as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez seek to broker a broader deal on releasing remaining guerrilla hostages.
The FARC - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - says the men were killed in an attack on its camp by an unknown armed group, but Uribe charges the guerrillas killed the men in an accidental firefight with another rebel unit.
"They are going to hand over the bodies on Saturday, but it's too late - that's September 1 and they killed them on June 18," said Uribe, who wants a forensic commission to determine how the men were killed. "What must have happened to those bodies by now?"
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been engaged in negotiations on the release of the bodies, is making progress, a spokesman said, but he declined to confirm the president's statement or give any details on a date and place for a hand-over.
The FARC has held scores of politicians, police and soldiers for years as hostages of Latin America's oldest insurgency, including French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt caught in 2002 and three Americans who were taken a year after.
The deaths of the local assembly lawmakers, kidnapped more than five years ago from Cali, provoked outrage. Thousands of Colombians took to the streets of Bogota in a march to demand rebel hostages be freed.
Chavez was due to arrive in Colombia on Friday to try to break a stalemate over freeing the hostages, some of whom have spent nearly a decade in secret rebel camps in the jungle.
Attempts to broker an exchange of hostages for jailed rebels are stalled over a rebel demand Uribe demilitarise a safe zone to facilitate talks. But the president refuses to cede territory he says will allow the rebels to regroup.
Violence from Colombia's four-decade-old conflict has fallen sharply under Uribe's tough security campaign, but the FARC is still strong in remote rural areas, helped by finances they gain from the country's huge cocaine business.
- REUTERS
