Bogota  - Former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was held hostage by leftist rebels for more than six years before her rescue in early July, said Monday that she is not yet planning to return to Colombia because of death threats issued by her former captors.

Bogota - A valuable engraving by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya was stolen from a museum in Bogota, and the museum received a letter Sunday in which the thieves said they were protesting the high price of tickets for the art exhibition.

The work Tristes Presentimientos (Sad Premonitions) belonged to the series The Disasters of the War and was part of an 80-work exhibition on Goya (1746-1828) in the Colombian capital.

Police were looking into the letter regarding the robbery - signed by the so-called Commando Free Art S-11 - and analysing footage from security cameras.

Bogota  - Some 25,000 people disappeared in Colombia over the past 20 years in incidents related to the internal armed conflict that has affected the country for over four decades, the Attorney General's Office said Wednesday.

Office representative Luis Gonzalez told Colombian radio network Caracol that the department has received 17,000 formal complaints of disappearances in the past 16 months alone, most of them involving the extreme-right paramilitary groups.

Bogota- Colombian police found close to 1 million dollars, allegedly belonging to a drug cartel, hidden inside a small plane that was to fly from Quibdo to Bogota, the authorities said Tuesday.

Colonel Jose Herrera, police commander in the north-western Colombian province of Choco, said 904,040 dollars were stashed away in the plane's nose and tail.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the cash belonged to the North of the Valley drug cartel or to the drug and paramilitary gang led by Daniel Rendon, alias Don Mario.

Bogota  - Three military and two police officers were killed Friday in an ambush by leftist rebels in the north-western province of Choco, on the border with Panama, officials said.

Choco police chief Coronel Javier Herrera said army and police were patrolling the area between Quibdo town and Tutunedo, one of the poorest regions in the country.

The patrol was attacked by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Herrera said.

Bogota  - Colombian police have seized 5 tons of cocaine, with a street value of about 570,000 dollars, near the country's border with Venezuela, local media reported Thursday.

The drugs were found in the municipality of Uribia, in the La Guajira region, where they were stashed. The cocaine was to be smuggled outside Colombia, media reports said, quoting regional police commander General Oscar Gamboa.

The cocaine belonged to drug baron Daniel Rendon, alias "Don Mario," Gamboa claimed. No arrests were made.