(Reuters) -Forty-five Colombian soldiers are being held in a drug trafficking area in the country's west, the defense minister said, the latest in a series of similar incidents blamed by the government on rebels who reject a 2016 peace deal.
The soldiers were being held by some 600 people in El Tambo, in Cauca department, Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote in a post on X late on Sunday, referring to an area in the western Andes.
Seizures of soldiers, often by local communities who the government says are pressured by rebels, are not uncommon, and recent incidents have ended in soldiers being released unharmed.
Sanchez blamed rebels commanded by a dissident known as Ivan Mordisco and demanded the soldiers' immediate release.
"It is a crime against humanity that does not have a statute of limitations and will be prosecuted by all international justice systems," he added.
Colombia's six-decade-long internal armed conflict between the government, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers has killed more than 450,000 people.
(Reporting by Deisy Buitrago in Caracas and Stefanie Eschenbacher in Mexico City)
