The last three hostages, all males, were identified by friends and family
                  members as residents of the southwest city of Cali where Cuban-inspired
                  National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels raided a Roman Catholic church
                  during Mass on May 30.

                  As with other worshippers before them, they were freed in rugged mountains
                  overlooking the city, the second-largest in this troubled country of nearly 40
                  million people.

                  ELN commandos freed most of the churchgoers soon after storming the La
                  Maria church, in an upscale district of Cali, and in a large group released
                  during live television news broadcasts in June.

                  As many as 30 were still being held last month, however. And rebel
                  commanders had conceded in a recent interviews that ransom demands
                  were made for some of the remaining hostages, who were set free in a
                  piecemeal fashion that dragged out over weeks.

                  It was not immediately clear if the trio freed on Friday paid for their release.
                  But Guillermo Valencia, a brother of one of the men, told reporters he
                  thought the rebels released the last of the hostages in a bid to win
                  concessions from the government that could open the way toward peace
                  talks.

                  The high-profile ELN raid on the Cali church, which was deplored by Pope
                  John Paul, was one of several incidents that marked an upsurge in a
                  long-running guerrilla war that has taken the lives of more than 35,000
                  Colombians in the last decade alone.

                  In April, another ELN unit hijacked a commercial airliner over northern
                  Colombia and forced it to land on a clandestine dirt airstrip before
                  kidnapping some 50 passengers aboard.

                  Sixteen of the aerial kidnap victims are thought to remain in the hands of the
                  ELN, which is Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group and fields around
                  5,000 seasoned combatants.

                  Colombia is widely regarded as the kidnap capital of the world with about
                  2,600 abductions reported last year alone.

                  Authorities blamed rebel groups for more than half of the kidnappings and
                  guerrillas readily admit using ransoms, which they prefer calling "taxes," to
                  finance their war against the state.

                  The ELN, which was founded in the mid-1960s, swiftly attracted a number
                  of radical Roman Catholic priests into its ranks, keen to put their brand of
                  Christian Marxism into practice.

                  The force was led by defrocked Spanish priest Manuel "El Cura" Perez until
                  his death last year. His successor, Nicolas Rodriguez, sneaked out of his
                  hide-out in northern Colombia last summer and reputedly travelled to the
                  Vatican to apologise to senior church leaders for the assault on La Maria.

                     Copyright 1999 Reuters.