Investigators may get new leads in Oct. kidnapping of oil workers

 BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombian police have arrested four peasant women carrying a small part of the $13 million ransom paid for four American and three other foreign
 oil workers who were kidnapped in neighboring Ecuador last year, police and prosecutors confirmed Friday.

 The arrests and recovery of the $269,900 strengthened the FBI's belief that the estimated 30 kidnappers were Colombians, most of them former members of leftist guerrilla
 groups more interested in profits than ideology.

 They also may provide new leads to FBI, Ecuadorean and Colombian investigators who vowed to track down the kidnappers after they executed another American hostage
 in an attempt to pressure the men's employers to pay a higher ransom.

 The hostages' 141-day ordeal highlighted the growing threat of kidnappings in the region, especially for Americans and other foreigners working in eastern Ecuador's
 oil-rich Amazon River basin.

 Police arrested the women near the town of Villa Garzón in Colombia's southern Putumayo state, neighboring the Ecuadorean province of Sucumbíos, where the oil
 workers were kidnapped Oct. 12.

 Ecuadorean kidnapping experts say the gang maintained telephone contacts with collaborators in the city of the Putumayo state capital of Mocoa, 10 miles north of Villa
 Garzón, during other abductions of foreign oil workers in 1996 and 1999.

 Police said Rosa Jamioy Jacanamijoy and daughter Emelina were arrested March 1 when a routine roadside search by anti-narcotics police found $149,900 in U.S. $100
 bills strapped to their bodies and in a cardboard box.

 On March 24, police searching a bus in Villa Garzón arrested sisters Bella and Inéz Mutubanjoy Jamioy with $120,000 strapped to their bodies. The four women appeared
 to be related, though their surnames are common among the several Indian tribes in Putumayo, police said.

 Prosecutors and police who initially investigated the case said the bills' serial numbers had been traced to the $13 million ransom, delivered Feb. 14 by a helicopter in
 seven boxes weighing 900-plus pounds. The oil workers were released two weeks later, on March 1.

 LOW-LEVEL `MULES'

 Police said the women were probably not part of the kidnapping gang but rather low-level ``mules,'' messengers hired to deliver the money to someone else. There was no
 indication of the women's destination when they were arrested, they added.

 Nevertheless, underlining the importance of the arrests, the women were transferred to a Bogotá jail April 13 -- normally, they would have been held in Mocoa -- and their
 case was sent to the money-laundering division of the attorney general's office in Bogotá.

 Police officers involved in the arrests said the women refused to tell them anything about the money, but added that they had been told by superiors that the women had
 begun cooperating with prosecution investigators after reaching Bogotá.

 Prosecutors in the capital said they could not comment because the case was under investigation. The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá declined to comment on the arrests or
 whether Washington would seek to extradite the women.

 Putumayo is a huge coca-growing and cattle-farming region largely controlled by Colombia's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
 Colombia, known as FARC.

 But it is also home to many former leftist guerrillas who abandoned the armed struggle and chose to live in the relative safety of the region, until 1998 all but free of
 right-wing paramilitary gunmen who have killed about 4,000 demobilized rebels since the late 1980s.

 ONE THEORY

 FBI officials believe the Americans' kidnappers were former members of the Popular Liberation Army, known as EPL, a small Marxist guerrilla force that once thrived on
 kidnappings of wealthy cattle ranchers.

 About half of its 600 to 800 members laid down their weapons in 1991 under a government amnesty program, but the other half continues fighting and kidnapping in small
 units scattered around Colombia.

 The Americans freed were Arnold Alford, Steve Derry and Jason Weber, of Gold Hill, Ore., and employees of Erickson Air-Crane, a heavy-lift helicopter company, and
 David Bradley of Casper, Wyo., employed by Helmerich & Payne, an oil drilling firm from Tulsa, Okla.

 Also released were Juan Rodríguez of Argentina and Germán Sholz of Chile, employed by Schlumberger, a New York oil services firm, and Dennis Corrin, a New
 Zealander employed by Erickson.

 The kidnappers were believed to be part of the same gang that abducted seven Canadian and one American oil worker in 1999 from the same region of Ecuador, where
 several foreign companies are exploring for oil and building pipelines.

 MURDER VICTIM

 After their release, the U.S. Embassy in Quito expressed relief that the ordeal was over but noted that another kidnap victim, Ronald Sander of Sunrise Beach, Mo., had
 been ``brutally murdered'' as the kidnappers sought to pressure ransom negotiators to raise their offer.

 ``The U.S. government will continue working with the Ecuadorean government to locate, arrest and bring the perpetrators of this horrible crime to a court of law to be
 prosecuted to the fullest extent possible,'' the embassy statement said.

 The Herald reported later that a U.S. Delta Force Team had been poised to attempt a rescue, but that preparations were canceled after the kidnappers dropped their
 demand for an $80 million ransom and settled for $13 million.

                                   © 2001