Video: Ingrid Betancourt released | Did France help or hinder?

Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician freed after six years in rebel captivity, embraced her two children today in an emotional airport reunion which she described as "paradise".

Fighting back tears and clinging tightly to Lorenzo and Melanie, Ms Betancourt said her son and daughter were "so different and so similar at the same time". The pair were 13 and 16 when she was kidnapped by Farc rebels in February 2002, while campaigning for the Colombian presidency, and have since grown into young adults.

“Nirvana, paradise - that must be very similar to what I feel at this moment,” she told reporters at Bogota airbase, less than 24 hours after her rescue along with 14 other hostages by Colombian security forces.

France's government flew the children from their home in Paris to meet their mother, a dual citizen whose captivity became a cause celebre in the nation where she spent her childhood.

As the plane door opened, Ms Betancourt ran up the stairs and embraced her children, Melanie and Lorenzo Delloye, her former husband Fabrice Delloye and her sister Astrid.

The group momentarily disappeared inside the plane to continue their reunion out of view of television cameras.

“I think it was an orgy of kisses,” she later told reporters on the tarmac, dressed in a dark trousersuit and white blouse, thin but glowing.

“I wanted to feel them, touch them, look at them ... They are so beautiful,” she said of her children. “I told them they would have to put up with me, because I was going to behave like a piece of gum ... I was going to eat them up with kisses,” she said.

Melanie Delloye, 22, called the reunion the “strongest and most beautiful moment of our life." She appealed to Colombia and the international community to continue working to free captives still held by the rebels, saying: “We need to keep fighting so this moment will come for everyone."

Ms 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.

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.

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