Rebel video shows kidnapped Betancourt is alive

For the first time in five years, proof emerged yesterday that the kidnapped politician Ingrid Betancourt and three American hostages were still being held alive by Farc guerrillas in Colombia.

Films, captured and broadcast by the Colombian government, showed a gaunt-looking Mme Betancourt, 45, who has joint French and Colombian nationality, sitting chained in a jungle camp in late October.

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has campaigned for Mme Betancourt's release, said: "Now we know she is alive, we will work relentlessly to win her release, and the end of her nightmare, as soon as possible."

Mme Betancourt, who is married to a French diplomat, was kidnapped by the ultra-leftist drug-trafficking Farc movement while she was a Colombian presidential candidate in 2002. Colombia encouraged by M. Sarkozy recently enlisted the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, to intercede with Farc for her release. His mission was suspended last week after a quarrel with the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe.

Both the French government, and Mme Betancourt's family, claimed yesterday that the videos were proof that the mediation efforts of President Chavez had begun to bear fruit.

The videos were found in the possession of three Farc members captured by the Colombian military. Officials in Paris said they had evidently been filmed in response to efforts by Mr Chavez to seek proof that Mme Betancourt and other high-profile hostages were still alive.

The videos also showed captured Colombian military officers and three American contractors, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell, who were kidnapped after their aircraft crashed during an anti-cocaine smuggling mission in February.

Letters from the hostages including one from Mme Betancourt to her mother were among other documents found on the three captured guerillas.

Mme Betancourt's sister, Astrid, said she and her mother were "very, very, very moved" to have the first conclusive proof that she was alive in more than four years. "All we see is a photo where she is sitting at a small table and appears fairly thin, with very, very long hair," Astrid said in an interview with LCI television. "I had the impression that her hand was chained. It's a sad image of my sister, but she is alive."

Mme Betancourt's son, Lorenzo, said the videos showed that "Farc have a human side and realise they absolutely needed to give a sign that she is alive". He said that President Uribe who had "consistently impeded release efforts in the past" should now reinstate the mediation efforts of President Chavez.

Mme Betancourt, a Green senator in the Colombian parliament, was running an anti-drugs and anti-corruption presidential campaign when she was kidnapped on a roadjust south of Bogota in February 2002. Her fate has become a live political issue in France, where successive governments have tried to win her release. President Sarkozy promised during his campaign last spring that he would succeed where others had failed.

Farc began as a far-left liberation movement in the 1960s. It now has no clearly defined political aims but controls a large area of Colombian jungle and holds hundreds of hostages, most of them much less well connected than Mme Betancourt.

Speaking before a Franco-Italian summit in Nice yesterday, President Sarkozy, said: "I was convinced that she was alive but we had no proof. My thoughts go to her family ... Everything we have done in the last six months is coming to fruition today but nothing has been won until she is free."