Pope Francis urges skeptical Colombians to accept peace with guerrillas

Pope Francis urged on Friday that Colombians skeptical of a peace deal with guerrillas to be open to reconciliation with those who have repented, speaking hours after a top rebel leader asked the pontiff for forgiveness.

"Dear people of Colombia: do not be afraid of asking for forgiveness and offering it,"he said, at an emotional meeting that brought together victims of the 50-year civil war with former guerrilla and paramilitary fighters.

The Argentine pope, leader of the world's Roman Catholics, is visiting Colombia with a message of national reconciliation, as the country tries to heal the wounds left by the conflict and bitter disagreements over a peace deal agreed last year.

Francis flew to the city of Villavicencio in Meta province, a vast cattle ranching area which was a hotbed of right-wing paramilitary and Marxist guerrilla violence during a conflict with successive governments.

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The Pope's afternoon prayer meeting in Villavicencio with about 6,000 survivors of the brutal conflict was the centerpiece of his five-day trip to overwhelmingly Catholic Colombia.

As he left Villavicencio, he stopped to pray at the Reconciliation Cross, a memorial to survivors and those killed during the war, and planted a tree as a symbol of peace.

The Pope later returned to Bogota where he was greeting by enthusiastic supporters outside the nunciature as he continued to deliver a message of peace and reconciliation.

He travels on Saturday to Medellin, once notorious as the stompinggrounds of drug lord Pablo Escobar, a city transformedsince his predecessor Pope John Paul visited in 1986.

The Popewillvisita home for children who were victims ofviolence and Francis will addresspriests, nuns, seminarians and theirfamilies at theLaMacarenabullring inMedellin.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, violence between cartels, paramilitary groups and guerrillasraged in the poor "comuna"neighbourhoods on Medellin'soutskirts andthe late pontiff was moved to decry drug violence.

Francis is expectedto honour the commitment andsacrifice of those who dedicate themselves to religiousvocations when he says mass for a crowd expected to drawhundreds of thousands of people near an airport.

The city is now heralded as a model of urban development. Ithas installed cable cars up the steep Andean slopes thatsurround it to save working-class residents a punishing climbhome and built libraries in neighbourhoods once host to gunbattles.

Feared drug trafficker Escobar, Medellin's most infamousresident, was gunned down in the city in a U.S.-backed operationin 1993. He was recently resurrected as a character in thepopular Netflix series Narcos.