Ingrid Betancourt, Colombia’s most prominent hostage, was freed yesterday along with three US military contractors and eleven others in an audacious raid that dealt the biggest blow yet to Farc, the country’s Marxist rebel movement.

“This is a miracle,” Ms Betancourt said after she stepped off the military aircraft plane that had flown her to the capital, Bogotá. “Thank you Colombia, thank you France.”

Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s Defence Minister, said that all the hostages, who were rescued from a jungle about 40 miles from the city of San José del Guaviare, were in reasonably good health.

Ms Betancourt, 46, who is French-Colombian and a former presidential candidate, was seized by Farc rebels on February 23, 2002, while campaigning in a remote and dangerous area near a rebel-controlled zone. She was captured along with her running-mate, Clara Rojas, who was freed in January. The three US Defence Department employees — Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell — were seized after their aircraft crashed while on a drug eradication mission in 2003.

Ms Betancourt’s family were elated about her release. “It is the most beautiful news of my life,” her son, Lorenzo Delloye-Betancourt, said in France. “I’m really surprised and happy.”

Ms Betancourt’s sister, Astrid, said: “I am filled with happiness. These have been long years of waiting.”

Mr Santos said that intelligence officers had infiltrated Farc’s command structure and ordered the hostages to be taken by helicopter to meet Alfonso Cano, the rebels’ new military commander. “This was an unprecedented operation. It will go down in history for its audaciousness and effectiveness. The helicopters, which in fact were from the army, picked up the hostages in Guaviare and flew them to freedom.”

Last night Ms Betancourt described how she and the other hostages had been handcuffed and loaded on to the helicopter, expecting to be moved to a different rebel camp. Once they were in the air, “something happened, I’m not quite sure what”, she said, and her captors were on the floor. “A soldier said: ‘We are the Colombian National Army; you are free.’ The helicopter nearly fell out of the sky with all the celebrations.” She said that she still aspired “to serve Colombia as president”.

Ms Betancourt, a mother of two, is from a wealthy international background and was once profiled in Vanity Fair. She has long campaigned against drugs and corruption in Colombia, and until her capture, she had run a punchy and irreverent presidential campaign laced with humour. She handed out free Viagra samples with a promise to invigorate Colombians in their fight against graft.

She topped the bestseller lists in France with her autobiography, Storm in My Heart, and was to some reviewers a modern-day Joan of Arc.

But six years of captivity took a terrible toll on her. In an early video released by her captors, she appeared feisty and called on Colombian security forces to rescue her. The last time Ms Betancourt was seen in a video in 2007, she was shown sitting on a chair, staring blankly at the ground. Her face was gaunt and her hair had grown past her waist.

A letter to her mother, captured along with the video by security forces, was a testament to her increasingly despondent state of mind. “I feel like my children’s life is on standby, waiting for me to be free, and their daily suffering makes death seem like a sweet option,” she wrote.

Yesterday’s raid is a coup for President Uribe, who has made fighting the rebel movement, the drug trade and cutting crime his priorities.

Farc guerrillas have been holding about 40 prominent hostages in the jungle and hoping to negotiate the release of about 500 of the group’s jailed fighters. The rebels, Latin America’s oldest insurgency, have financed their operations through hostage-taking and cocaine-running.

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