Kidnapped US baseball player rescued

With tears in his eyes, Wilson Ramos, a catcher for the Washington Nationals professional baseball team in the US, embraced his rescuers and said he had wondered whether he would survive a kidnapping ordeal that ended when Venezuelan commandos swept into his captors' mountain hideout.

Ramos said he was thankful to be alive and described his "hair-raising" final moments as a prisoner during the rescue on Saturday, when soldiers exchanged heavy gunfire with the kidnappers in the remote area where he was being held.

He said his kidnappers had carefully planned the abduction and told him they were going to demand a large ransom.

"I didn't know if I was going to get out of it alive," Ramos told reporters at a police station in his hometown of Valencia, flanked by police investigators, national guard commanders and the country's justice minister, Tareck El Aissami. "It was very hard for me. It was very hard for my family."

El Aissami said the authorities had arrested four of the captors, all of them Venezuelan men in their 20s. A 60-year-old woman and a 74-year-old man were also arrested as accomplices for supplying the kidnappers with food, he said.

The six suspects were led past journalists at the police station with black hoods over their heads.

The authorities were still searching for at least four Colombian men who escaped during the rescue, El Aissami said. He did not say whether anyone was wounded in the gun battle. -UK Guardian