A former hostage has had an emotional reunion with her young son three years after she was forcibly separated from him by her captors.

Clara Rojas cried and hugged her son Emmanuel at the state-run orphanage in Bogota where he has been growing up in ignorance of who his parents were.

Ms Rojas, once a political aide to a Colombian presidential candidate, gave birth to Emmanuel in 2004, while she was enduring a six-year hostage ordeal at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a leftist guerrilla group.

The boy was fathered by one of the guerrillas. Eight months after his birth, however, he was taken away from his mother and handed to a peasant, who placed the baby in the hands of the Colombian social services.

Unaware of his true identity, the social workers placed him in a foster home in the Colombian capital, where the boy has remained for the last two years.

It was only after the Farc began negotiations with the Colombian authorities to free Ms Rojas that the child's identity emerged. Authorities discovered Emmanuel living in the foster home and guessed his parentage based on what little was known about him, including that he had a broken arm. DNA tests later confirmed their suspicions.

Child psychologists began to prepare the boy to meet his mother by showing him photographs of her, in order to ease his transition away from foster care.

Ms Rojas only discovered that Emmanuel was still alive two weeks ago, in a New Year’s Eve radio broadcast.

On Thursday the Farc handed over Ms Rojas and another kidnapped politician, former congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez, to a Venezuelan-led delegation which then moved the hostages to Caracas.

With a photo of her son around her neck, Ms Rojas flew to Bogota and yesterday had a six hour meeting with the child. One photo released by Colombia's child welfare agency show the Emmanuel practising drawing with marker pens with his mother at his side. Another shows the pair with their arms wrapped round one another in a close hug.

Ms Rojas said that Emmanuel had made her a gift, and they were shown apparently exchanging a paper with artwork on it.

The story of Emmanuel has transfixed Colombia since a journalist first reported in a 2006 book that the child was born to Ms Rojas as the product of a relationship with one of her captors, reportedly a rank-and-file guerrilla named Rigo.

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