U.S. Peace Workers Seized in Nicaragua Are Released

A group of American religious workers reported kidnaped by Nicaraguan rebels was released unharmed Thursday and resumed its “boat ride for peace,” group officials said.

“They are free. They are navigating the (San Juan) river, but they are not completely out of danger,” said Sharon Hostetler, a spokeswoman in Managua for the Witness for Peace group, an ecumenical Christian organization.

The river is on the border between the two countries.

She said that all 29 members of the group’s peace delegation and 14 journalists who were accompanying them were freed after 29 hours in captivity in Costa Rica.

In San Jose, Costa Rica, presidential spokesman Armando Vargas said that a police helicopter pilot flying over the area an hour later saw the boat traveling in Nicaraguan waters. He said that it appeared at to be traveling peacefully and without escort.

Vargas said that the pilot spotted the boat cruising upstream toward San Carlos, where the river begins at Lake Nicaragua. He added that the president’s office had information that the group never entered Costa Rican territory.

At a news conference here later, Hostetler said that she had spoken by radio with Warren Armstrong, the leader of the group reported seized Wednesday morning as it neared the halfway point of a two-day journey along the river to protest U.S. policies resulting from the Reagan Administation’s hostility toward Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

One of the Americans had said by radio that the group was captured by U.S.-backed rebels of the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. Spokesmen for the alliance, commonly called ARDE here in Central America after its initials in Spanish, have denied participation in the incident.

According to Hostetler, Armstrong said that before releasing them, their captors told members of the group to transmit a message “saying that they are not ARDE. They call themselves an independent anti-Communist group of Nicaraguans.”

For its part, ARDE said: “We categorically deny detaining or much less kidnaping the (group) . . . since the area where they were allegedly kidnaped is held by the Communist forces, and the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance has never kidnaped anyone and has returned 550 POWs to the International Red Cross.”

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had promised officials of Witness for Peace that the Sandinista army would not interfere with the release of the group, which was reportedly captured near La Penca.

Spokesmen for Witness for Peace said U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels, called contras , fired shots over the boat Wednesday morning and forced them into Costa Rican territory.

During his visit to the office of the ecumenical Christian organization here late Wednesday, Ortega said the Americans’ fate “is in the hands of the U.S. government.”

In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokesman Dan Lawler confirmed that the religious delegation and journalists have been sighted on the river once more but said that the department could not confirm that the Americans were kidnaped by a contra group.

Costa Rican Civil Guards in a boat and a helicopter spotted the group heading up the river toward Lake Nicaragua on Thursday afternoon, Lawler said, adding that his information had come from the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica.

But “we still don’t have any confirmation as to who held them and where they were held,” Lawler added.

In the Nicaraguan town of San Carlos, Associated Press correspondent Filadelfo Aleman reported that local Sandinista authorities gathered schoolchildren and teachers on the docks Thursday, saying they were to welcome the American activist group. The preparations began hours before Witness for Peace announced that the group and its boat had been released.

Meanwhile, a 22-member Witness for Peace delegation from California left Los Angeles International Airport bound for Managua on Thursday, declaring that they would not allow the alleged kidnaping to interfere with their “peace mission.”

The delegation, made up primarily of Southern Californians, arranged the two-week trip prior to learning about the reported abduction and will proceed to northern Nicaragua as planned, said spokeswoman Patricia Krommer, a Roman Catholic nun who heads a Central American relief fund in Los Angeles.