Freed hostage to marry fiancee

Bogota, July 6: The Colombian fiancee of freed US hostage Keith Stansell has travelled to meet him in Texas along with their five-year-old twin boys, who will see their father for the first time.

Ms Patricia Medina said in an interview broadcast on Saturday that she and Mr Stansell plan to get married. She spoke before leaving Colombia on Friday for San Antonio, Texas, where he and two other Americans were taken after Colombia’s military rescued them from rebels.

Ms Medina was pregnant when the US defence contractor’s drug-surveillance plane went down in Colombia’s southern jungle in February 2003. He later learned in captivity that she had given birth to twins, Nicolas and Keith.

"We’re going to organise the wedding," Ms Medina said. "We talked to Keith last night. He talked with the boys." She said Mr Stansell told her "he’s super happy, and that he’s waiting for us there." Former Colombian senator Luis Eladio Perez says he relayed Mr Stansell’s marriage proposal to Ms Medina, and she accepted.

Ms Medina met Mr Stansell in April 2002 while working as a flight attendant on an Avianca flight. Mr Stansell and the two other freed American hostages have been receiving medical care at Brooke Army Medical Centre at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston. —AP

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‘US planned to test nerve gas on Oz soldiers’

Sydney, July 6: The US military had sought to test deadly nerve gases on Australian soldiers in a far north Queensland rainforest in the 1960s during the Cold War, a report said.

Australian defence files obtained by Channel Nine show the US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops by aerial bombing areas around Lockhart river.

Newly-declassified de-fence and PM’s office files show that the US was strongly pushing then Prime Minister Harold Holt’s government in the 1960s to allow test of the deadly gas, but Mr Holt vetoed the plan.

The plan never went ahead, but American survey teams inspected the proposed testing site, the report said.

Mr Peter Bailey, a former senior official, says the Australian government was concerned that its Cold War alliance with the US would be damaged if it did not accept.

—PTI