Some 25,000 people disappear in Colombia over 20 years

BOGOTA: Some 25,000 people disappeared in Colombia over the past 20 years in incidents related to the internal armed conflict that has affected the country for over four decades, the Attorney General's Office has said.

Office representative Luis Gonzalez told Colombian radio network Caracol Wednesday that the department has received 17,000 formal complaints of disappearances in the past 16 months alone, most of them involving the extreme-right paramilitary groups.

Gonzalez, director of the office's Justice and Peace Unit, said many relatives file their complaints in the hope of recovering the bodies of their loved ones, since they assume they have been killed.

The official noted that the attorney general's investigation points to the paramilitaries as the faction that has resorted the most to forced disappearances of people, but leftist guerrillas, drug gangs and other common criminal gangs have also committed that crime.

Several former members of paramilitary groups who have demobilized following negotiations with the government have told Gonzalez and his assistants the coordinates of the places where scores of victims were buried in mass graves.

In the most recent exhumation of bones Aug 26, the remains of 22 people were found in a rural area in Turbo, in the province of Antioquia. They had been massacred by the paramilitaries.