Mexico rebels offer truce if activists released

MEXICO CITY, Oct 2 - Mexican rebel group EPR Said it would stop bombing fuel pipelines if affected businesses back its demands that the government release two missing activists, local media said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the Marxist-inspired Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, also demanded an amnesty for all political prisoners in Mexico, the daily El Universal reported in its online editions.

The daily Reforma and Mexican television also picked up the statement. A Web site that normally publishes statements from Latin American guerrilla groups, including the EPR, still was checking the authenticity of the statement.

The government repeatedly has denied it is holding the two activists, who the EPR says were captured in May in the volatile southern city of Oaxaca where the guerrilla group is based.

The two activists, one of whom is the brother of EPR leader Tiburcio Sanchez Cruz, had been living clandestinely for years.

"We repeat that when our companions are presented alive and free, all military political action will cease immediately and we will continue with the political work that we have always developed," Reforma quoted the EPR as saying.

The EPR bombed fuel pipelines in half a dozen places last month, disrupting crude oil supplies to two refineries and cutting off energy supplies to dozens of major industries, costing thousands of hours of production.

In Tuesday's statement, the EPR appealed to the businesses affected by the energy disruption to pressure the government about the missing activists.

The EPR, which calls for land reform and ultimately a socialist state, burst back into public view in July after years in hibernation with a similar set of pipeline attacks.

Believed to number just a few hundred members, the EPR made headlines in the mid-1990s with a string of lethal ambushes on rural police and army bases, but has been quiet for several years.

In Tuesday's statement the EPR denied it was using the disappearance of the activists to justify an intensification of their campaign, as has been suggested by some officials.