Luis Diaz: Police search forest for kidnapped father of Liverpool forward and offer reward for information

Police are searching a forest in northern Colombia for the father of Liverpool footballer Luis Diaz who was kidnapped on the weekend.

Luis Manuel Diaz and his wife were at a petrol station in the small town of Barrancas on Saturday when they were abducted by armed men on motorcycles.

The forward’s mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was rescued within hours by police after they set up roadblocks around the town near Colombia’s border with Venezuela. However, his father remains missing.

Air and land patrols as well as members of the country’s special forces have been searching a mountain range that straddles both countries and is covered by cloud forest.

Police have also offered a $48,000 (£39,000) reward for information leading to the rescue of Diaz’s father.

Officials said they did not rule out the possibility that he could have been smuggled into Venezuela, where he would be beyond the reach of Colombian police.

Diaz is one of the most talented players on Colombia’s national team and joined Liverpool last year in a deal worth £55m.

The 26-year-old was absent from Liverpool’s match against Nottingham Forest on Sunday.

His team-mates expressed their solidarity with him by holding up his shirt on the pitch after scoring the team’s first goal in their 3-0 victory.

The abduction of Díaz’s parents comes as kidnappings for ransom and extortion of businesses increase in Colombia despite efforts by the nation’s first left-wing government to broker ceasefires with rebel groups.

Criminals and rebel groups in the country have long kidnapped civilians for ransom in order to finance their operations.

So far, none of the armed groups operating in Colombia has claimed responsibility for kidnapping Diaz’s parents.

‘This is a huge trauma for Colombian society’

Analysis by South American Football Expert Tim Vickery:

“This is a huge trauma for Colombian society. These kind of kidnappings, if you go back a few years, they were going at a rate of about 4,000 per year when the FARC guerillas were using them to raise funds.

“I remember my first time in Colombia for the 2001 Copa America, the first time Colombia had ever staged anything like this, and it nearly did not go ahead as a senior member of the Colombia FA was kidnapped shortly before the tournament. Argentina did not turn up at the last moment, Mauro Silva, the Brazil international, checked in at Rio airport, then got scared and decided not to go and then at Bogota airport his suitcase was rather pathetically going round the carousel.

“And these kind of events are a real trauma for Colombian society – the Colombians were so happy that anyone had gone there to see Colombia with their own eyes and come to the conclusion there were many other things that were great about Colombia, not just the negative headlines that people read about in newspapers.

“Since then, the number of kidnappings have gone down and down and down to around 200 a year, but Colombia is in trauma today because yet again, the world is reading about Colombia for negative reasons.

“This is a very, very worrying time obviously for Luis Diaz and his family. There is always the fear, as happened further north in Honduras a few years ago, to the brother of the then Tottenham midfielder Wilson Palacios, that the kidnappers decide just to cut their losses and anything could happen then.

“Unfortunately, it is the very success and the riches he accumulates from that success that makes him a target for this type of nefarious operation.”