A Colombian judge will rule within 10 days on whether the three Irishmen acquitted of training FARC rebels can leave Colombia, where they fear reprisals from right-wing death squads, their lawyers said tonight.
Jim Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley, who were cleared of the main bomb charges on Monday but convicted of carrying false passports, can leave a Bogota prison where they have spent the past 33 months since their arrest if they pay a fine of about $7,000 each.
But the Colombian attorney general's office said this week the men must stay in Colombia - even if they leave prison - until the court rules on the state's planned appeal of the acquittal on the bomb charges.
The men's lawyers said the possibility of the men remaining in Colombia, outside prison walls, could draw reprisals from far-right paramilitaries who target suspected rebel sympathisers.
Lawyers for the three filed a request late last night asking Judge Jairo Acosta to allow their clients to return home.
"They (government) created the problem, they need to fix the problem. The men are not safe," said Caitriona Ruane, of the "Bring Them Home" campaign.
Ruane said the Irish government was advancing the money to help pay the fines and that "Bring Them Home" would return the money in two months.
The attorney general's office accuses the three of being contracted by Colombian rebels to teach them bomb-making techniques during a trip to a former rebel stronghold in the jungle in 2001.
Their acquittal was an embarrassment for the government, which seized on the men's arrest as proof of the international reach of the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, branded a "terrorist" group by Washington.