Kidnapped Father of Colombian Soccer Star Is Freed

The father of Luis Díaz, a Colombian soccer star for the English club Liverpool, was freed on Thursday after he was kidnapped by a guerrilla group, Colombian officials said.

“We report with joy the release of Don Luis Manuel Díaz,” the Colombian government’s commission for peace talks said in a statement on Thursday morning. “We hope that he will soon regain his tranquillity, disturbed by an act that should never have happened.”

It was not immediately clear what was exchanged, if anything, for the elder Mr. Díaz’s freedom.

A helicopter with a handful of representatives from a local Catholic church and a United Nations mission in Colombia, along with a medic, picked up Mr. Díaz, 56, in a rural area of Barrancas — which is in La Guajira, a region of northern Colombia — and took him about 55 miles southeast to the city of Valledupar, government and rescue officials said.

“He was obviously emotional to be reunited with his family,” Carlos Ruiz Massieu, the special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General in Colombia, told The New York Times. “He needs more in-depth medical analysis after a situation like this, but he looked good in general.”

Both of Mr. Díaz’s parents were kidnapped on Oct. 28 by armed men from a gas station in their hometown, Barrancas. His mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was rescued hours later, but her husband, Luis Manuel Díaz, remained captive.

The Colombian national police and the military mobilized to find Mr. Díaz amid fears that the kidnappers might have taken him from Barrancas across the border to Venezuela.