Legionnaire Jose Olger Melo Charry walks into Policarpa after four days on the run

Jose Olger Melo Charry, a Franco-Colombian corporal in the French Foreign Legion, presented himself to the authorities in Policarpa, Nariño, after a four-day walk through the Andes. The French armed forces staff confirmed to Le Monde on 7 September that he is safe. An AFP military source said he escaped his captors on Thursday 3 September and that he is in good condition, under protection against reprisals. He was flown from El Ejido to Pasto, the departmental capital, and admitted to hospital with his family.

Melo Charry was seized on 6 August while travelling on a road in southwestern Colombia. He was on leave. A woman travelling with him was taken and released a few hours later. The Estado Mayor Central, the largest FARC dissident faction that rejected the 2016 peace accord, claimed the kidnapping. Nariño is a corridor for cocaine and illegal mining. Armed groups there take people for money and for leverage. Thousands of such abductions have marked the long Colombian war.

The French defence ministry told Le Monde it was relieved and thanked Bogota. It also put a hard fact on the record. Melo Charry, though Colombian by nationality, is a soldier of France. He was not authorised by his chain of command to travel to Colombia. He was allowed to remain in metropolitan France. The ministry said it had watched the case from the first day because of that status, and that a Colombian judicial inquiry is under way. A military source told AFP that his Legion training is what kept him alive on the walk.

Four days on foot in Nariño is not a cinematic sprint. The department's roads are watched. The EMC knows the tracks. A corporal who leaves a camp and reaches a town without being recaptured has either out-marched a pursuit or been let go. The French and Colombian statements do not settle that question. They settle the location. He is in a hospital in Pasto, not in a camp.

The Legion recruits foreigners and makes them French soldiers. Melo Charry's dual identity is the reason Paris had a claim and Bogota had the ground. It is also the reason his unauthorised trip is now a disciplinary file as well as a hostage file. The ministry was careful to separate those tracks: relief first, then the reminder that he should not have been on that road.

For Colombia the case is one more EMC abduction in a department the state does not fully hold. For France it is a soldier recovered after a month in the hands of a group that still uses kidnapping as policy. The next documents will be a Colombian investigative file and, inside the Legion, a note about leave. The corporal's own account, when he is well enough to give it, will decide how those documents read. Until then the confirmed facts are short. Taken on 6 August. Gone from the camp on 3 September. In Policarpa four days later. Alive.