2 Abducted Clerics Rescued

The Colombian army Friday rescued a Roman Catholic bishop and a priest from Marxist rebels who kidnapped them four days earlier, authorities said, in what the government hailed as a major victory for its tough new security policies.

Anti-guerrilla troops pounced on a group of six suspected guerrillas and rescued Msgr. Jorge Enrique Jimenez and the Rev. Desiderio Orjuela on Friday morning, in mountains near where they were kidnapped Monday outside the capital, Bogota, the army said. The kidnappers were alleged to be members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

One suspected rebel was killed and two captured in the operation, which involved a manhunt led by the army’s commander in chief, Gen. Carlos Alberto Ospina. Combat continued into the afternoon.

Torn between laughter and tears, an unshaven Jimenez thanked God and the Virgin Mary as well as the army and President Alvaro Uribe, and said he believed the prayers of the nation were with him throughout the ordeal.

Jimenez, 60, the bishop of Zipaquira, near Bogota, and president of the conference of Latin America’s Catholic bishops, thanked Orjuela for refusing to accept an offer by the captors to be set free.

“He told me he was my bodyguard,” Jimenez told a news conference after the two men clambered out of a helicopter at a Bogota army base.

The kidnapping, in a week when Uribe’s government marked 100 days in office, drew international condemnation and posed a tough test of the new president’s promises to restore law and order in a country torn by a 38-year-old war.

“We are going to work day and night, with all our energy, to free Colombia of terrorism and violence,” the president said.