Liverpool's Colombian football player Luis Diaz was reunited on Tuesday with his father for the first time since he was freed by National Liberation Army guerrillas after being held hostage for 12 days in a mountainous area of Colombia.
Photographs published by the Colombian Football Federation on its X account, formerly Twitter, showed the moment when the striker and his father, Luis Manuel Diaz Jimenez, embraced and visibly moved.
With the message "Welcome home Luchooo!", the Colombian Football Federation announced Diaz's arrival in Barranquilla, where the Colombian national team will play against Brazil on Thursday in the fifth round of the South American qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup.
Diaz's parents were kidnapped in late October in Barrancas, a small town in the northeastern department of La Guajira, when they were at a gas station and intercepted by armed men on motorcycles.
His mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was released hours later.
Diaz Jimenez was released on Thursday in the vicinity of the Serrania del Perijá, a mountainous area of difficult access on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, from where he left aboard a helicopter with intermediaries from the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
The kidnapping of Diaz Jimenez left the peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the ELN in a critical state and opened the debate about the guerrillas' willingness to dialogue.
The government has demanded that they commit to cease kidnappings and release those who remain in captivity, an issue that will be a priority for the next round of talks.
The ELN justified the kidnappings on Sunday as a way of financing itself, which it had not renounced in the midst of the peace talks, and claimed that its organization "is poor like the majority of Colombians."