A GERMAN man held by rebels in Colombia for five years has been freed and was safe and well in Bogotá, the German Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

Lothar Hintze, 60, was kidnapped on March 16, 2001, by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and taken away by boat.

Rosy Hintze, his Colombian wife, said that her husband was released late on Tuesday and was in good health. He was undergoing medical and psychological treatment at the Germany embassy in Bogotá.

She was awaiting word of their long overdue reunion. “The second they call me, I’ll run out the door,” Mrs Hintze, 40, said.

She had not spoken with her husband in the five years since he was grabbed from her arms by 15 to 20 heavily armed rebels who came up on the couple by boat as they bathed at a tourist complex that he was building in southern Colombia.

“My faith in God saw me through this ordeal,” she added.

The details of Hintze’s release were still unknown last night as the German Embassy said it would not release any information about his liberation.

Mrs Hintze would not reveal how much money she gave to FARC, but said that her hopes were raised falsely she made at least three ransom payments over the years.

Her husband’s release came as a shock, she said, because the last sign of life she received was a video, in November, in which her emaciated husband “begged not to be left to die in the mountains”.

Mr Hintze came to Colombia as a backpacker from Stuttgart in the 1970s, his wife said.

He built several businesses, including the tourist complex that he was working on at the time of his abduction in Prado, 90 miles (150km) southwest of the capital.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German Foreign Minister, said that he was “relieved” that years of patient work had secured Herr Hintze’s release.

“This would not have been possible without the cooperation with the Colombian Government, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Catholic Church,” he said.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said that he could not provide any further details surrounding the release.

About 370 people were kidnapped for ransom in Colombia last year, down from a peak of about 3,000 in 2002, when Álvaro Uribe became President and began challenging the rebels.

After cocaine smuggling, kidnapping is a lucrative business for criminal gangs in Colombia and is used frequently by FARC to raise funds to fight their four-decade insurgency against the Government.

Colombians represent the vast majority of the 800 people kidnapped last year, according to Pais Libre (Free Country), a victims rights’ groups.

Estimates of the number of people being held captive reach as high 4,000, but just 215 are believed to be foreigners.

Three US defence contractors, whose aircraft was shot down over the jungle while they were on an anti-narcotics mission in 2003, are among them.

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