France will keep trying to help Colombia hostage

PARIS (Reuters) - France will seek another way to help hostage Ingrid Betancourt after abandoning plans to send a medical team to treat her in the Colombian jungle where she is held, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Wednesday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made it a priority to secure the release of Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen who was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, while campaigning for the Colombian presidency in 2002.

Sarkozy had said Betancourt was seriously ill and close to death. The guerrillas rejected the medical mission on Tuesday and the French jet carrying the medical team left Colombia for Martinique, a French overseas department, on Wednesday after a week on the tarmac at a Bogota air base, authorities said.

"What matters is that we will continue in one way or another and we must find her," Kouchner, who is due to travel to the region soon, told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting.

"We must first think together about the (new) proposal, visit all the surrounding countries, and I will do that," he told Europe 1 radio later on Wednesday.

Betancourt, three Americans, politicians, police and soldiers are among 40 political captives whom the FARC says it wants to exchange for jailed fighters. The guerrillas and government are deadlocked over a hostage deal.

The French medical mission flew into a Bogota air base on Thursday to treat Betancourt, who has been in captivity for more than six years.

FARC's rejection of the mission meant it had no chance of success, but that did not mean France had given up, Kouchner said. He did not elaborate on what France intended to do.

"I will go there in the relatively near future to try to lay down the outline once again of a mission that will no doubt be different," he said. He did not specify where he would go.