Ingrid Betancourt is to return to Colombia to start work on a play about her experience of being held in the jungle for six years by Marxist rebels.

After receiving a heroine’s reception in France, where she became a cause célèbre, Ms Betancourt told Le Journal du Dimanche: “I shall return to Colombia in a few days. Meanwhile I want to see France, all of France. I also want to be alone with my children. I want to give this time to my family, to the father of my children, who fought an extraordinary fight for me.”

Asked whether she would write a book about her experience, she replied: “I’ll write a play.” Despite suffering from illness during her captivity, Ms Betancourt got a clean bill of health from doctors examining her for the first time since the operation to rescue her and 14 other hostages from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). She said after tests at the Val-de-Grace hospital in Pari that she was “very, very surprised” not to have any physical side-effects after more than six years of captivity.

Ms Betancourt was cared for by another hostage, the Colombian army corporal William Pérez. “When he saw I was no longer getting out of my hammock, and I refused even to take a bath because I had no strength, he came to see me, and took it upon himself to restore me to life,” she said.

Mr Pérez was freed with Ms Betancourt, but returned home to learn that his father had died a few months ago and that his grandfather had suffered a fatal heart attack when he heard of his release.

At the weekend Ms Betancourt spoke of how she suffered a moment of dread in her Paris hotel on Friday night when her son inadvertently turned off the bathroom lights.

“I found myself in the bathroom, without any light, in the pitch black, and I lost track of where I was. I had this dread and told myself, ‘My God, they’re back. The Farc have returned’. I was in a nightmare.”

Ms Betancourt has said that she was chained up night and day for three years by her captors. Asked whether she was tortured, she replied: “Yes, yes.” She said that she saw her captors lapsing into “diabolical behaviour”. “It was so monstrous that I think they themselves were disgusted,” she said.

Responding to claims by Swiss radio and some French newspapers, Ms Betancourt said that she did not believe a ransom had been paid for her freedom or that of the other 14 hostages. “Enrique”, her jailer at the time of her capture, was a man “of special cruelty”, she said, recalling his look of horror when he realised he had been tricked into placing his most valuable hostages aboard an army helicopter.

“When I saw him on the ground with his hands and feet tied and his eyes blindfolded, the expression on his face, it was not of someone who had been bought. He was mortified.”

A video of the mission released by the Colombian military showed chaotic scenes as the despondent hostages are handcuffed and taken aboard an unmarked, Russian-made helicopter, watched by dozens of rebels.

It also shows the emotional moment when the hostages realise they are free. “I was very, very afraid when we were jumping up and down in this helicopter of joy,” Ms Betancourt said this weekend, saying she feared something would go wrong.

As part of the ruse the soldiers, posing as a media crew, even tried to interview the Farc jailer “César”, who declined to talk on camera.

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