|
Freed hostage reunited with son
14/01/2008 07:20 - (SA)
|
|
|
 |
|
| Clara Rojas, the hostage released by leftist Colombian rebels, embraces her son, who was taken away from her when he was eight months old. (Family Welfare Institute, AP) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bogota - Newly-freed Colombian hostage Clara Rojas has regained informal custody of her three-year-old son Emmanuel, who was born while she was in captivity, officials announced late on Sunday.
The child, whose father is a guerrilla from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was handed over to Rojas by the Colombian Family Welfare Institute, a local government organisation.
Rojas met with Emmanuel at a state-run orphanage earlier on Sunday, hugging and kissing the three-year-old boy who was spirited away from her at the age of eight months.
FARC guerrillas captured Rojas - campaign manager for French-Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt - in February 2002. She was released with another hostage on Thursday.
Emmanuel was born in April 2004, the fruit of an apparently consensual liaison between Rojas, now 44, and a guerrilla fighter.
Get-to-know session
"Emmanuel has been transferred with his mother to a special location," institute director Elvira Forero told reporters. "They had a six-hour get-to-know session today in hopes of restoring family ties."
However, Forero pointed out that legal paperwork formalising the transfer still needed to be finished.
Outside, police had blocked off the area as hundreds of locals flocked to the orphanage in an attempt to witness the event.
Rojas, who discovered that Emmanuel was alive in a New Year's eve radio broadcast, flew into Bogota's military airport with her family from Caracas for the meeting.
On the tarmac, she was greeted by Colombian government officials, including the director of the institute, which has been caring for the boy for months, and Luis Carlos Restrepo, President Alvaro Uribe's peace commissioner.
The meeting Sunday capped weeks of drama that began in early December when FARC rebels announced they would release Rojas, Emmanuel and Colombian politician Consuelo Gonzalez to representatives of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
That release never materialised, and the rebels later admitted they did not have the child and that he was in the care of an orphanage in Bogota.
Forero told AFP prior to Rojas's arrival that the boy had undergone psychological preparations for the emotional reunion with his mother.
|
