Oil Workers Freed in Ecuador
By JOSE VELASQUEZ, Associated Press Writer
QUITO, Ecuador (AP) - Forced to walk for 141 days through dense jungle in Ecuador, seven foreign oil workers - including four Americans - were recovering in a hotel Friday after their release for a reported $13 million ransom.
Exhausted, cut and bruised, the workers were picked up by a military patrol at a prearranged rendezvous point Thursday, according to military and oil industry sources. Authorities vowed to track down their captors.
The kidnappers killed Ronald Sander, 54, of Sunrise Beach, Mo. during the four-month abduction. Sander was an employee of Helmerich & Payne, Inc., an oil exploration company based in Tulsa, Okla.
The Americans freed Thursday were identified as David Bradley, another Helmerich & Payne employee from Casper, Wyo.; and Arnold Alford, Steve Derry and Jason Weber of Gold Hill, Ore., all employees of Erickson Air-Crane, a helicopter company.
Unidentified gunmen abducted 10 men - five Americans, two Frenchmen, a Chilean, an Argentinian and a New Zealander - on Oct. 12 from an oil field in the Pompeya jungle region, about 45 miles south of the border with Colombia.
They hijacked a helicopter and forced the pilot to fly them deep into the jungle, where they began months of hiking.
"We were walking the entire time, day and night, rain or shine,'' German Scholz, a Chilean consultant for European energy giant Repsol-YPF, told Channel 10 television Thursday shortly after being freed.
Two Frenchmen escaped a few days after the kidnapping, and Scholz said the kidnappers duped their captives into thinking Sander was released as part of a ransom deal.
"On January 24, the day that we were separated from him, we shook hands and said goodbye,'' he recalled. "The promise was that they were freeing Ron because that was the deal they had agreed to with the oil companies.''
A week later, Sander was found on a jungle road Jan. 31, shot five times in the back and covered in a white sheet scrawled with the words in Spanish: "I am a gringo. For nonpayment of ransom. HP company.''
The kidnappers who had taken Sander away rejoined the group 12 days later and told the remaining captives that he was in Quito, Ecuador's capital.
"We were very happy, and now we find out that they killed him,'' Scholz said.
Scholz said the kidnappers had been debating whether to take away him or Sander. They finally settled on Sander because they said the Americans had been asking for him.
Captive Juan Rodriguez of Argentina described the four months as "terrible'' and said the kidnap victims were shackled in chains during the night.
"One time they thought that I was planning to escape and they put chains on me. I was chained for four complete days,'' Rodriguez, an employee of a subsidiary for Schlumberger Ltd., a New York-based oil field services company, told Channel 10.
The other hostage was Dennis Corrin of New Zealand, an Erickson employee.
In Gold Hill, Ore., friends and families of the three helicopter company employees said they were relieved.
"You think about (the kidnappers) going back on their word,'' said Paul Derry, brother of helicopter mechanic Steve Derry. "They've got their money, you know. They could just do away with them. That's been a pretty heavy worry.''
After their release, the men were given food, baths and spare military fatigues to wear at the jungle outpost of Lago Agrio. They were then flown to Quito, where they were staying in a downtown hotel.
The U.S. Embassy in Quito said Thursday it would continue working with Ecuadorean authorities to catch the kidnappers. "We will not consider this case closed until the guilty parties are brought before justice,'' a U.S. Embassy statement said.
The kidnapping gang is believed to be made up of at least 25 people, officials said. They used automatic weapons, dressed in military fatigues and were organized like a paramilitary group.
Diplomatic officials and police say the group started operating several years ago and is composed mainly of Colombian deserters from some rebel insurgency, possibly the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, that country's largest guerrilla group.
Local newspaper and television reports have speculated that the kidnappers are may also be linked to Colombia's smaller leftist rebel group, the National Liberation Army.
Police have also said the abductors were part of a group that is treating kidnapping as an "industry.''