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Indian Maoists free one Italian tourist, another still held

Claudio Colangelo was taken hostage with tour guide Paolo Bosusco while swimming in a river on March 14, in what is believed to be the first time the rebels have targeted foreigners.

Italy’s foreign minister said Colangelo had spoken to local Italian diplomatic staff by telephone and was in good health.

“It was a frightening experience,” Colangelo told Indian NDTV network after a rebel commander released him at a jungle camp 16 hours hike from main roads. “They stole 10 days of my life,” he said as he travelled by car toward state capital Bhubaneswar.

He said he hoped his friend Bosusco would be freed soon, that he had missed his family, and wanted to return to India.

“I hope they understand we are Italian, Paolo has nothing to do with this war,” Colangelo said on NDTV. TV images showed him wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. He told Sky Italia he would meet the Italian consul in Bhubaneswar, where he was expected to arrive late on Sunday.

“Now we have to bring Paolo Bosusco home,” Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi said in a statement.

NDTV journalists who received Colangelo at the camp said he told them he had been treated well while held captive.

POLITICIAN KIDNAPPED

Colangelo’s release came the day after talks between the government and rebel-nominated negotiators collapsed. On Saturday, suspected Maoists kidnapped an Orissa state politician, adding to the tension.

Also known as Naxals, the Maoists have fought a decades-long war against the government in a wide swathe of central India. They say they are fighting for the poor and landless, and they often back farmers in land disputes with big business.

The government calls them India’s main internal security threat, and an obstacle to higher growth and more jobs in Asia’s third-largest economy. Hundreds die annually in the conflict, although levels of violence have fallen in recent years.

Analysts said they believed the kidnappings were designed to draw attention to the plight of tribal people in one of India’s poorest regions.

Orissa state’s home department secretary U.N. Behera said the government will do all it can to secure the release of the other hostages.

The fighters said they took the Italians because they were taking photographs of indigenous tribeswomen bathing in a river. Among their demands is an end to tourism in sensitive areas of the state, and that the government ends operations against them.

Colangelo told Sky Italia he and his friend, who runs a tour company in Orissa’s beach resort and temple town Puri, were seized while they were swimming.

A few weeks ago, a scandal erupted over what the insurgents regard as “human safaris” and the practice of taking tourists to see naked people on the Andaman Islands and in Orissa.

Authorities in the state have vowed to stop the practice, but the Maoists say not enough has been done.