Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez, today called on the Venezuelan authorities to use their “most efficient assistance” to find twelve people, ten of them Colombian, abducted on Sunday in Venezuela.
“It is a dramatic and serious situation and we must be very vigilant. I hope that the Venezuelan authorities will apply their most efficient assistance to help us find these people,” Bermudez told RCN Radio.
News agency EFE reported that Bermudez said there was no information to be made public yet, but that there had been contact with Venezuelan authorities to ask them to dedicate attention to the matter.
Last Sunday at noon, twelve members of an amateur football team were kidnapped from a makeshift football field in the town of El Chururu, in southern Tachira near the Colombian border. Apparently the kidnappers seized a list of players’ names from the referee and, after a threatening them with firearms, began to call names “at random”. The players were forced into a number of vehicles and were driven away. Their families did not report the event for fear of reprisals.
The Venezuelan press did not rule out that the event is an operation of illegal groups forcibly recruiting new members.
A Venezuelan guerrilla group calling themselves the Bolivarian Armed Liberation Force is allegedly behind the kidnappings.