By Matters India Report
New Delhi, Jan 22, 2022: An Indian Catholic priest serving Ethiopia as a missionary was released January 22, a day after an armed gang kidnapped him, according to information reaching the Indian capital.
Father Joshua Edakadambil of the Order of the Imitation of Christ, or Bethany Ashram, was going to celebrate Mass in a mission station when the gang stopped his vehicle on the road. They then took the 32-year-old priest to a forest and kept him in their custody, narrated Bishop Varghese Thottamkara, Vicar Apostolic of Nekemte in Ethiopia, a country in East Africa.
“The rebel soldiers, who took him for mistaken identity, released him after the Catholic Church negotiated mentioning his identity,” the Vincentian prelate told Matters India in an email message.
Bishop Thottamkara also said the Church is now trying to get back the priest’s pickup vehicle that was confiscated by the gang.
He said the missionary priest, who was ordained only two years ago, has returned home in good health.
Father Edakadambil, a native of Kerala, has been serving in Ethiopia’s Nekemte Apostolic Vicariate for the past two years.
The vicariate is directly under the Vatican, and not part of an ecclesiastical province.
The vicariate territory has followers of Ethiopian Orthodox, Islam and Coptic Catholicism.
Bishop Thottamkara, 62, came to Nekemte in 1990, after serving the Church in Odisha, eastern India, for several years.
Nekemte is some 320 km west of Addis Ababa, the national capital.