Peruvian soldiers rescue prisoners kidnapped for some 25 years

A Peruvian military operation managed the release of more than a dozen people who were kidnapped by the Shining Path rebel group up to 25 years ago, international media report.

The Guardian reports that after being used as slaves in remote mountain communities, the 13 adults and 26 children were evacuated by helicopters.

Peru’s vice minister of defence, Ivan Vega added that some of the victims had grown so accustomed to their lives with the Marxist group that they were initially reluctant to be rescued.

The eldest captive was reportedly a 70-year-old women who was kidnapped from a convent in Puerto Ocopa decades ago, while the youngest was a one year old.

The army said many of the children were conceived when the kidnap victims were raped, while others still were reportedly abducted from villages, indoctrinated and told they had to work in “production camps” to supply the revolutionary guerrilla group. Sources add that the children were frightened by the soldiers as they had been told they were the enemy.

The Guardian adds that about 120 troops and four army helicopters took part in the operation on 23 July in a Shining Path stronghold in the heavily forested valley at the confluence of the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro rivers, a region that is also a centre of cocaine production.

The Shining Path group was largely defeated in the 1990s after it started a blood-soaked insurgency that left almost 70,000 people dead or missing, but remnants of the group remain active nonetheless.

The group had been led by brothers Victor and Jorge Quispe Palomino, who have been indicted in the US for alleged drug trafficking offences.