Instincts, luck save Colombia hostage from execution

 A hostage who narrowly escaped execution by his FARC captors said Monday he survived by ignoring their orders and instinctively fleeing into the jungle when the Colombian guerrillas' camp came under fire. The rebels killed their four other hostages -- three with shots to the head and a fourth with a bullet in the back -- including the FARC's longest held hostage, a soldier who was captured 14 years ago, the Colombian defense ministry said. The lone survivor was Luis Alberto Erazo, a 40-year-old policeman who had been held for 12 years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia until he broke away Saturday after shooting erupted before dawn between the FARC rebels and an advancing military unit. "Days earlier this commander Arturo had told us that if shots were fired we should not run to the outside, but to run to where they were because they were going to get us out and deliver us safe and sound to our families," Erazo said. "That was the order," he told Radio Caracol, adding that during their captivity the rebels had treated the hostages well and assured them "nothing was going to happen," even though the prisoners were chained every night from dusk to dawn. "At the moment of truth, when the shots were fired, I forgot the order," Erazo said. "The only thing I could think of was to run to the jungle." "I ran to the jungle and my companions ran to the rebels and there they killed them gratuitously." He said three guerrillas were guarding the hostages and a "reaction squad" of about 40 guerrillas was posted some 10 meters (yards) away. As he fled, Erazo heard "a hail of bullets," the policeman said, adding that the troops had not yet reached the place where the hostages had been held under guard. Erazo was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade tossed his way, but he managed to escape and eventually came into contact with the soldiers who rescued him. After the fighting, the soldiers found the bodies of the other four hostages. The remains of police colonel Edgar Yesid Duarte, police lieutenants Elkin Hernandez and Alvaro Moreno, and army sergeant Jose Libio Martinez were received with full military honors on their arrival Sunday night at a military airport in Bogota. The FARC, Colombia's oldest and biggest leftist guerrilla group, still has 13 police and soldiers hostage, most of whom have been in captivity for more than 10 years. Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon, meanwhile, rejected suggestions that the hostages died because the army had botched a rescue operation. He indicated that the troops stumbled on the guerrillas as they were winding up a 45-day-long operation that had been prompted by intelligence reports that a FARC unit might be holding hostages in the area. A rescue operation is mounted "only when the (guerrilla) structure and the hostages have been located, and in this case that never happened," he said. When the troops "were leaving the area after all that time, the found some tracks and on checking them out they came into combat with a FARC structure," he said. "Very possibly that is when they (the rebels) decided to kill them and flee," Pinzon said.