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.