BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Colombian authorities sought over the weekend to discredit a Swiss academic and former intermediary in talks with a left-wing rebel group who has been linked to a disputed report that officials paid $20 million for last week's release of 15 high-profile hostages.
A Colombian government official who asked to remain unnamed said Sunday that authorities suspect Geneva-based Jean Pierre Gontard was the source for the Swiss radio report last week stating that officials paid a ransom for the release of the hostages.
Officials have denied any ransom was paid and said the rescue was based on subterfuge and infiltration of the rebel high command. The notion of paying ransom is extremely sensitive here, since U.S. and Colombian authorities have labeled the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a terrorist group and have ruled out payments to terrorists.
Meanwhile, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told the newspaper El Tiempo that captured rebel computer files name Gontard as the courier for $480,000 seized by Costa Rican police at the behest of the Colombian government this year from a FARC hide-out in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital.
With the Colombian government's permission, Gontard has represented Switzerland in previous efforts to broker a peace agreement with FARC rebels.
On June 30, the government announced that Gontard and French diplomat Noel Saez had arrived in Colombia to resume those efforts. Two days later, onetime presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American defense contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers were rescued after more than five years in rebel captivity.
"This Mr. Gontard is going to have to explain" why his name appeared in electronic messages of FARC commander Raul Reyes, since slain, as "transporter" of the $480,000, Santos told El Tiempo.
Gontard, reached at his home early today in Geneva, declined to comment on the $480,000 allegation, and strenuously denied leaking information to Swiss public station Radio Suisse Romande. "It absolutely was not me" who spoke to the radio program, Gontard said.
According to the Colombian defense minister, the mention of Gontard was found among the thousands of electronic files recovered from the laptop computers of Raul Reyes, nom de guerre of a top FARC commander, who was killed by Colombian air and ground forces in Ecuador on March 1.
