Colombian rebels release video of kidnap victims

Marxist rebels in Colombia have released video footage of their most famous hostage, the presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was abducted by gunmen five months ago.

Apparently recorded in mid-May at a jungle hideout, the 22-minute tape is the first proof that Ms Betancourt, 40, and her campaign manager, Clara Rojas, were not immediately killed, but their condition two months on is not known.

In the tape the former senator appears haggard and subdued as she reads from a script. She lambasts the armed forces and the outgoing president, Andres Pastrana, for putting her in danger by refusing her permission to board a helicopter and campaign inside the former safe haven controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the country's most powerful rebel army.

She demands that the government investigate why the security provided to alternative candidates was so lax.

Ms Rojas, clad in faded fatigues like those worn by the candidate, looks pale and says nothing on the tape. The pair are among an estimated 3,000 kidnap victims held for ransom every year in Colombia.

Farc commanders have said they will hold Ms Betancourt and other politicians until the government agrees to swap them for jailed guerrillas, but government policy rules out such trades.

Ms Betancourt, the mother of two teenagers, was educated in Paris, where her father worked for the United Nations, She has been hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc for her crusades against corruption and the widespread collusion between drug traffickers and politicians. Her Green Oxygen party polled just 2 per cent of the vote in the 26 May election won by the hardliner Alvaro Uribe, who assumes office next month.

In the video, Ms Betancourt says that for any resolution of Colombia's 38-year civil war, the government must resume peace negotiations with the rebels, which were cancelled by Mr Pastrana in February.

Ms Betancourt sat at the negotiating table with guerrilla representatives eight days before she was taken hostage.

Her mother, Yolanda Pulecio, said she had been determined to enter the southern stronghold of the Farc to campaign. Ms Pulecio said: "Ingrid said, 'They won't kidnap me, Mama, because I don't have dirt on my hands. The guerrillas know that I'm clean'." Just weeks after she was taken by the Farc, Ms Betancourt's father died of respiratory failure.

Besides Ms Betancourt and Ms Rojas, the Farc is also holding five congressmen, former ministers of defence and development, and the elected governor of Antioquia province.

A grenade flung from a car into an café in Medellin on Tuesday was blamed on Farc's newly active urban militia. The blast killed a former congressman, Hidebrando Giraldo, and a friend, and injured 15 others.

In a change of policy, the government's peace commissioner, Camilo Gomez, said he was prepared to meet Manuel Marulanda, commander of the rebel army, to discuss ways to free 20 political hostages.

* Colombia's secret police announced yesterday that they had captured a rebel leader, Jorge Enrique Carvajalino, who hired a pilot to crash a plane in a suicide attack on the capital, Bogota. Police said Farc rebels had been plotting to fly a plane into the Congress building during Independence Day ceremonies on 20 July or into the presidential palace on 7 August during the inauguration of the next president.