Source: Reuters Pubdate: 6 Dec 1997 COLOMBIA FACES NEW THREAT OF DRUGRELATED TERROR By Tom Brown BOGOTA, Dec 6 (Reuters) Colombia faced a new round of drugrelated terror on Saturday after selfidentified members of a group called ``The Extraditables'' said they had kidnapped President Ernesto Samper's press secretary and a reporter. Police said they were unable to confirm the authenticity of the claims, made in a series of telephone calls to local radio and television news programs. The whereabouts of Samper's press aide, William Parra, and of Luis Eduardo Maldonado, a reporter with the RCN radio news network, have been unknown since they left the Casa de Narino presidential palace together late on Thursday. Authorities said the phone calls to local media outlets were the only leads they had in the case. The presidential palace issued a statement on Friday night demanding that Parra and Maldonado be freed at once. ``The presidency of the Republic demands the immediate release of the two journalists so that they can return to their homes and places of work,'' it said. It added there was no independent confirmation the pair was being held by ``The Extraditables.'' But in brief remarks to reporters in the Caribbean port of Cartagena, Samper said: ``Whatever group it is, kidnapping isn't the best way of making any sort of petition.'' Samper did not elaborate. But the callers to Noticiero 24 Horas, a TV news station, and to RCN and Radionet allnews radio, gave assurances that Parra and Maldonado would be released with ``a message'' for the government about the recent vote in Congress lifting Colombia's ban on the extradition of drug lords and other criminals. Parra, who took over as Samper's press secretary in January, is one of Colombia's bestknown television journalists. Unlike most government officials, he was never assigned a bodyguard or official escort. Bogota's El Espectador newspaper said he vanished, together with Maldonado, while en route to a parking lot near the presidential palace in the bustling downtown area of the capital. ``The Extraditables'' was the name of a private army formed by late Medellin cartel drug lord Pablo Escobar to wage a campaign of terror including high profile car bombings, assassinations and kidnappings against extradition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Seeking to end the violence, which took hundreds of lives, Colombia's Constituent Assembly clamped a constitutional ban on extradition in 1991. Acting under intense pressure from Washington, Congress voted to lift the ban just last week. The move was criticized by U.S. officials because lawmakers diluted the extradition bill to prevent it from applying retroactively meaning Colombia will probably never cede to U.S. requests for the extradition of Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, jailed leaders of the Cali drug cartel. But Congress threw open the door to extradition in future cases, an act that critics described as a shameless concession to ``foreign intervention'' and ``Yankee imperialism.'' Statements attributed to ``The Extraditables,'' with the same letterheads once used by Escobar and echoing his trademark warning about preferring ``a tomb in Colombia to a jail in the United States'' surfaced on several occasions in the runup to the final extradition bill voted in Congress on Nov. 25. The most notable occasion was in September when a huge 550 pound (250 kg) car bomb was discovered by police in Medellin, the city Escobar ruled like his personal fiefdom until he was gunned down by police in December 1993.