ELN release statement announcing Luis Díaz’s father will be released

Luis Díaz’s nightmare will soon be over. The National Liberation Army (ELN) has announced that the Liverpool player’s father, who was kidnapped by armed members of the group in in Barrancas, northern Colombia on 28 October, will be set free.

The ELN issued a statement on social media which read: “The Northern War Front has commandos with economic missions - one of them carried out a deprivation of liberty, which when reported, was verified to be the father of Lucho Diaz. His release is being instigated, because he is a relative of the great footballer loved by all Colombians. From now on the release process begins and we want to avoid any further incident. Firm in the quest for paths of peace, with the necessary transformations that the country needs”.

The statement is signed by Commander José Manuel Martínez Quiroz, of the ELN’s Northern War Front, who thus recognizes responsibility for the kidnapping and also discards the hypothesis that the kidnapping was carried out by another group that handed him over to the ELN as mediator.

On Saturday 28 October, the player’s parents were kidnapped at a gas station in the municipality of Barrancas, in the department of La Guajira, in northeastern Colombia, although a few hours later the mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was released. Luis Manuel Díaz was detained.

Luton away

Luis Díaz was excused from his club duties by Liverpool during his ordeal and missed the team’s last two games but returned to full training with the squad in Kirkby on Friday. He could be included in the squad that travels to Luton for tomorrow’s Premier League clash at Kenilworth Road. Reds manager Jürgen Klopp told reporters in his pre-match press conference that he will leave it up to the player to decide whether he feels up to travelling with the squad on Sunday.

“We must wait. If he feels right, he will be here and train with us. The session he had with us you can see when he is with the boys he is fine, he is OK. But you could see he didn’t sleep a lot. We have to see how he is and we go from there,” Klopp explained. “The news from Colombia gives us a little bit of hope. We are waiting for the really good news but that’s it pretty much. I cannot say what we will do because we just wait where we can pick up the boy from and go from there. But it’s all about him, if he makes himself available or not, and I will not force anything”.