Colombian guerrilla group frees kidnapped Spanish journalist

A Colombian guerrilla group on Friday released Spanish journalist Salud Hernandez days after she went missing over the weekend, media reported.

Her reappearance caps "a week of speculation (as to) whether the journalist was kidnapped, embedded with a guerrilla unit or held hostage," the English-language Colombia Reports said on its website.

Colombia's second-largest insurgency, the National Liberation Army (ELN), released Hernandez in a rural part of the northeast Colombian department of Norte de Santander, where she had been seized.

The correspondent for Spanish newspaper El Mundo and a columnist for Colombian daily El Tiempo, said she had gone to the area to cover Colombia's ongoing conflict.

"From the first moment I was held against my will ... I told them they were committing a kidnapping," Hernandez said.

On Thursday, Colombia's Defense Ministry said the ELN was behind the kidnapping of Hernandez and other two Colombian reporters.