Colombia arrests terror group leader back from Cuba

CNN 28 September 1998 Colombia arrests terror group leader back from Cuba

                  BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters)
                  -- The ringleader of a shadowy Colombian terror group, who was exiled to
                  Cuba in 1996 after agreeing to release the kidnapped brother of an
                  ex-president, was arrested over the weekend in southwest Colombia,
                  authorities said on Monday.

                  Police identified the man as Fredy Geofrey Llanos Moncayo and said he
                  was the number two commander of JEGA, an extreme leftist urban guerrilla
                  group linked to a string of political assassinations and kidnappings.

                  Police said Llanos Moncayo, who was believed to have returned to
                  Colombia up to six months ago, was arrested early on Sunday in Popayan,
                  near Colombia's border with Ecuador, and had a long list of criminal charges
                  pending against him.

                  He masterminded the April 1996 kidnapping of Juan Carlos Gaviria, a
                  brother of former president Cesar Gaviria, the current secretary-general of
                  the Organisation of American States, according to National Police chief
                  Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano.

                  Serrano helped negotiate Gaviria's release, along with two personal
                  emissaries of Cuban President Fidel Castro, and was party to a
                  controversial deal under which Llanos Moncayo was granted refuge in
                  Cuba.

                  Police said it was not immediately clear how or why he had slipped back
                  into his homeland, but heralded his arrest as one of the most important in
                  Colombia in years.

                  "We're very pleased about this for a lot of reasons," Serrano told a news
                  conference. "This is the guy who negotiated, planned and carried out the
                  kidnapping of Juan Carlos Gaviria and others that he has claimed
                  responsibility for."

                  According to police, Llanos Moncayo was also involved in the kidnapping
                  of a brother of former president Belisario Betancur, a crime that occurred
                  while Betancur held office in 1983.

                  Gaviria, an architect, was kidnapped in central Risaralda province and held
                  for more than a month in a hellish underground hiding place smaller than a
                  man's coffin.

                  Llanos Moncayo, who kidnapped Gaviria in the name of a group
                  supposedly called "Dignity for Colombia," threatened to kill him unless
                  Congress voted to impeach then-president Ernesto Samper on drug
                  corruption charges.

                  But Castro issued a last-minute appeal for Gaviria's life, and granted Llanos
                  Moncayo and other suspected Jega members or their companions asylum on
                  communist-ruled Cuba in exchange for Gaviria's release.

                  Serrano said it was not clear if other fugitive members of the group had
                  returned to Colombia with Llanos Moncayo. Two of the seven people who
                  went with Llanos Moncayo to Cuba on June 12, 1996 -- on a corporate jet
                  provided by a millionaire friend of former president Gaviria -- were children.

                  The top leader of Jega, an enigmatic figure called Hugo Antonio Toro
                  Restrepo but better known by the alias Comandante Bochica, has been held
                  in the maximum security ward of Bogota's Modelo prison since early 1996.

Jega takes its name from Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular political leader
gunned down in Colombia 50 years ago.