New Zealand pilot Phillip Mehrtens freed by rebels after 19 months in captivity in Indonesias Papua region

The New Zealand pilot who’s been held hostage for more than a year in the restive Papua region has been freed by separatist rebels, Indonesian authorities said Saturday.Phillip Mark Mehrtens, a 38-year-old pilot from Christchurch who was working for Indonesian aviation company Susi Air, was handed over to the Cartenz Peace Taskforce, the joint security force set up by the Indonesian government to deal with separatist groups in Papua, after he was allowed to walk free early Saturday, said the taskforce spokesperson Bayu Suseno.“We managed to pick him up in good health” in the Yuguru village of Nduga district, Suseno said, adding that Mehrtens was flown to the mining town Timika for further health and psychological examination.Independence fighters led by Egianus Kogoya, a regional commander in the Free Papua Movement, stormed a single-engine plane on a small runway in Paro and abducted Mehrtens on Feb.7, 2023.Rebels have used violence to try to achieve independence amid the deteriorating security situation in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, a former Dutch colony in the western part of New Guinea that is ethnically and culturally distinct from much of Indonesia.Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 under a United Nations-sponsored ballot that was widely seen as a sham.Since then, a low-level insurgency has simmered in the region.Conflict spiked in the past year, with dozens of rebels, security forces and civilians killed.Kogoya initially said the rebels would not release Mehrtens unless Indonesia’s government allows Papua to become a sovereign country.Then on Tuesday, leaders of the West Papua Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement known as TPNPB, issued a proposal for freeing Mehrtens that outlined terms including news media involvement in his release.Suseno said that Mehrtens’ release was the result of hard work from a small task force team that had been communicating with the separatists led by Kogoya through th...