Nicaraguan Rebels Take Officials, Soldiers Hostage : Central America: The former Contras demand resignation of army chief and a presidential aide.

Rebels took at least 12 lawmakers, soldiers and government officials hostage Thursday in northern Nicaragua and demanded the resignations of two top Nicaraguan officials, the army said.

The hostage-takers, former Contra rebels who fought the leftist Sandinistas in the 1980s and who have rearmed, demanded the resignations of presidential aide Antonio Lacayo and army chief Gen. Humberto Ortega, said Lt. Milton Sandoval, an army spokesman.

Rearmed Contra rebels have said the former ruling Sandinistas are wielding too much power through Ortega, the military chief during the Sandinistas’ rule, and through Lacayo, whom rebels hold responsible for an alleged government policy to co-govern with the Sandinistas.

President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro vehemently rejected any possibility of dismissing her two powerful lieutenants.

“I repudiate this action and urge these men to lay down their arms. We are living in a time of peace and reconciliation; we will not let hostage-taking stand,” she declared.

The rebels seized at least 12 members of an official delegation. But a local TV journalist who was with the delegation but not taken said there were at least 33 hostages.

An army official said late Thursday that a conservative lawmaker, Anibel Martinez, was released to deliver a list of demands.

The hostages were being held by a group identified as the North Front 3-80 in the isolated mountain town of Quilali, about 30 miles south of the Honduran border.

The delegation was reportedly in the region to talk with former fighters about postwar reconstruction projects and a broad government amnesty passed Tuesday for rebel attacks prior to Aug. 15.

It was the first apparent rebel rejection of the amnesty, and the second action by a rebel group in two months.

An attack by a different rebel group composed primarily of former Sandinista soldiers on the northern town of Esteli in July killed at least 50 people. Former Contra rebels were also among that group.

An estimated 1,400 former Contras and some demobilized Sandinista soldiers have taken up arms again and split into different groups, saying Chamorro has broken her promises of land and financial help to former fighters since the war.