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The authorities used drones and dogs in the search efforts.
Venezuelan authorities reported Thursday that they found “in perfect health” the 16 people who had been reported missing after attending a religious retreat in the Venezuelan Andes mountains.
“After searching the mountain area for about 10 days, the 16 people were found (…) in perfect health (…) they said they were in a spiritual retreat praying,” tweeted Freddy Bernal, the governor of Táchira, a border state with Colombia, in western Venezuela.
The group, which includes a girl a few days old, among other minors, was missing from August 22when they left the city of La Grita, in Táchira, to a mountainous area of the Andes.
The relatives of the group of 16 people did not know anything about them, until this Thursday.
On Tuesday, the authorities of the state of Táchira deployed drones and dogs in a mountainous area around the town of La Grita to try to find the whereabouts of the group.
Mayor Freddy Bernal explained that they were found in a sector known as Páramo La Negra, between La Grita and the town of Tovar in Mérida state.
For his part, the director of the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC), Douglas Rico, posted on social networks photographs of officials of that body along with the 16 wanted people, including those of a woman with a baby in her arms. .
“The disappeared family group in Táchira was found safe and sound,” the official commented on the social network.
It is a case that kept the local population on edge from the state of Tachira. The mayor of the local municipality of Jáuregui, Juan Carlos Escalante, had described it as “very suspicious.”
the tachirense portal The nationreported this week that a 57-year-old religious woman would have persuaded the disappeared to follow her to a supposed encounter with God or the Virgin on a mountain in the moors of the Juan Pablo Peñaloza National Park, between the states of Táchira and Mérida.
But Venezuelan authorities did not immediately offer more details of what happened.
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