Boy Held 9 Months Freed in Colombia

Police freed a 9-year-old boy whose abduction by suspected rebels more than nine months ago sparked national outrage over the kidnapping of children, authorities said.

Twelve suspected rebels--alleged members of the tiny Jaime Bateman Cayon guerrilla faction--were arrested in early morning raids Friday after the boy’s father obtained his release by paying a $350,000 ransom, police in Cali said.

Dagoberto Ospina was abducted April 25 from a school bus on the way to the Alferez Real school on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city. He was part of a school group that was demanding children be spared from the crime and violence bred by the South American country’s 37-year conflict.

The case was widely reported in the news and became a rallying point for national outrage over the abductions of children by leftist rebels, drug gangs and common criminals. Colombia has the world’s highest kidnapping rate.

Dagoberto got a hero’s welcome at his school in Cali on Friday. Wearing a white soccer uniform and baseball cap, he smiled as he hugged fellow students and professors.

“Ten thousand letters arrived from all around the world. We never lost hope,” said Luis Carlos Tenorio, the principal at the Alferez Real elementary school.

But Dagoberto’s father told a news conference that he was leaving Colombia immediately and would never bring his children back.

Police said Dagoberto’s father met the kidnappers on Thursday and paid the ransom. Once the boy was in his father’s care, authorities moved in and captured the suspects and about half the money.

During the boy’s nine months in captivity, the family had seen Dagoberto only on a few videos sent by his kidnappers--one in which he sobbed while trying to speak.

Suspicion in the kidnapping had initially fallen on Colombia’s largest rebel army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But the group denied any involvement in the carefully planned abduction.

Witnesses said a pickup truck cut off Dagoberto’s bus, and three men with revolvers and grenades rushed aboard and searched for a child named “Ospina.” They grabbed the boy after finding his name written on a notebook.

Dagoberto had been all too conscious of the kidnapping epidemic in his country, where 3,000 people are abducted in a typical year. Less than a month before his kidnapping, he drew a poster of a child with a red band over his mouth, tears on his cheeks and chains on his hands and feet.

“Is this how you shape Colombia’s future?” the boy wrote underneath the picture, drawn as part of a school project to protest abductions of children.