Magazine post video supporting description of the two brothers as retirees

Colombia police: kidnapped Germans in good health

BOGOTÁ — Two German retirees who have been held captive for more than three months by leftist rebels are in good health, Colombia’s anti-kidnapping police chief said yesterday. The official, General Humberto Guatibonza, also said at a news conference that the two were seized on November 3 by the National Liberation Army, or ELN, Colombia’s number 2 rebel group.

Brothers Günther Otto Breuer, 72, and Uwe Breuer, 69, were detained while apparently on a global driving journey that had previously taken them to China, Iran, Iraq and much of South America.

The men were kidnapped in the town of Teorama in a turbulent coca-leaf growing zone near Venezuela with a strong guerrilla presence, Guatibonza said. ELN said it seized them in the nearby town of Convención.

Guatibonza did not say how he obtained the information, citing only informants. He said they also told police that the ELN originally thought the Breuer brothers were oil workers. Guatibonza said he was withholding further information about the case at the request of the German government. He said the men had last been in touch with relatives on September 30.

A video posted Wednesday on the website of the Colombian newsmagazine Semana bolstered the German Embassy’s description of the two as retirees on vacation. The video, apparently shot shortly before they were captured, shows the white-haired brothers sitting in camping chairs on an unpaved road in central Colombia while eating lunch outside the Toyota in which they say they’ve been travelling the world since leaving Bavaria in 2011.

Speaking in laboured Spanish, Günther jokes that his brother Uwe knows two words in Spanish, one of which is “cerveza,” or beer. Günther Breuer says the men entered Colombia in October from Ecuador and were headed next for Venezuela.

A journalist at Semana, Ricardo Calderon, said it obtained the 20-minute video from a group of Colombians who had come across the brothers by chance. In the video, several men are seen on all-terrain vehicles, which are intentionally blurred.

Herald with Reuters