Nine people missing in Colombia: reports

BOGOTA: Seven construction workers and two drivers have gone missing in eastern Colombia and may have been abducted by armed groups, according to the military and local media.

The Air Force said on its website on Tuesday that a search and rescue operation was launched after a bus in which the seven were riding got lost in the eastern Arauca province near the Venezuela border.

"There, according to reports, the missing people were presumably taken," the Air Force said, without providing further details.

The El Tiempo newspaper said "armed men, apparently guerrillas," had abducted seven employees of the Casanare Avanzada construction firm and the two drivers who had been traveling with them.

The mayor of Tame, a town near where they went missing, told reporters that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), two left-wing groups with a history of kidnapping, both operate in the area, without accusing either group.

The FARC, Latin America's oldest rebel movement, on Sunday said it would halt its longstanding practice of kidnapping civilians for ransoms to fund its armed struggle against the Colombian government.

The FARC, believed to have 8,000 members, has been at war with the government since 1964. It began a campaign of kidnappings in the mid-1980s, taking soldiers hostage to serve as bargaining chips for FARC prisoners.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2012