Bekaa body may finally end hostage riddle

Michael Theodoulou, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 10:57PM UAE / November 19. 2009 6:57PM GMT

A Lebanese soldier stands guard, left, as British experts search the area for the remains of Western hostage. AP

At the height of Lebanon’s civil war a quarter of a century ago, Alec Collett, a British journalist in his 60s, was plucked by masked gunmen from his car near Beirut airport, a no-go area for westerners.

Thirteen months later, his Libyan-backed Palestinian kidnappers issued a macabre videotape purportedly showing him being hanged in reprisal for American bombing raids on Libya. Some of the planes had taken off from bases in Britain.

The victim was hooded and unrecognisable but, like Collett, was missing a finger on his left hand.

Other more famous British hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy were eventually freed, while the remains of three other Britons murdered in captivity were recovered.

The grainy videotape remained the only clue to Collett’s fate – until this week, when British investigators recovered a body in the Bekaa valley thought to be his.

If confirmed by DNA tests, the last mystery of British hostages in Lebanon will be solved and his family will finally have the chance to give him a proper burial.

“We’re not expecting any conclusive results for a while yet – it could be weeks,” a spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in an interview yesterday. Unlike Collett, most of the 90 or so foreigners kidnapped during the latter stages of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war were held by shadowy extremist Shia Muslim groups operating under the aegis of the Iranian-backed Hizbollah.

“There were so many different groups you could never be sure what their different agendas were,” said Gerald Butt, the BBC’s Beirut staff correspondent in the 1980s. Like many other western journalists, he was ordered to leave Lebanon by his employers because of the kidnapping threat.

“Sometimes they were intra-Lebanese agendas, sometimes their targets had a broader regional agenda,” Mr Butt, now editor of the newly relaunched Cyprus-based fortnightly journal, Middle East International, said.

The kidnap victims were university lecturers, teachers and journalists, all sympathetic to Lebanon. Collett, a father of three, was a New York-based freelance journalist writing on the plight of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

That the organisation was helping the traumatised country proved no protection. Collett was seized at a roadblock on his way back from a Palestinian refugee camp in March, 1985.

His kidnapping was claimed by a secular group calling itself the Revolutionary Organisation of Socialist Muslims, a front for Fatah, the Revolutionary Council (FRC). It was a viciously anti-Arafat PLO splinter group, financed mostly by Muammer Qadafi.

This was well before the Libyan leader’s current rehabilitation, where he has been portrayed as a quixotic, western-friendly and harmless despot of an oil-rich country. For Ronald Reagan, the then US president, Mr Qadafi was the “mad dog of the Middle East”.

The FRC was headed by the notorious Palestinian renegade Sabri al Banna, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Nidal, a bloodthirsty gun-for-hire. Until the emergence of al Qa’eda in the 1990s he had been one of the world’s most notorious militants, responsible for a global trail of terror spanning three decades.

Abu Nidal died in murky circumstances in Baghdad in 2002. Some claimed he had committed suicide, while others said he had been murdered after falling out with Saddam Hussein during the prelude to the US-led invasion of Iraq months later.

Four years ago, an FRC member jailed in Colorado gave an interview to a British newspaper in which he claimed to have witnessed Collett’s execution. He said the Briton, dragged from his cell, handcuffed and hooded, was unaware what was happening until he felt a noose placed around his neck. “What, what, no!” were said to be his last words.

It is believed the FRC initially hoped to exchange Collett for three of its members imprisoned in Britain after the group’s botched assassination attempt in 1982 of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London. Israel used that attack as the pretext for its disastrous invasion of Lebanon, which led to the deaths of thousands of people, most of them civilians.

Collett appeared in a videotape in December 1985 urging Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s then prime minister, to release Arab and Muslim prisoners in British jails. His pleas were in vain.

When it became clear that Britain’s Iron Lady would not negotiate, Collett was kept for an opportune moment – it came when Mr Reagan ordered air strikes on Libya.

In the late 1980s, Lebanese kidnap groups provoked several headline-grabbing crises by issuing harrowing videotapes of their captives, threatened with execution, beseeching their governments to free Arab prisoners held in the West, Israel, or Kuwait.

In one particularly tense stand-off in 1989, the US dispatched warships to the Mediterranean after kidnappers threatened to execute an American hostage, Joseph Cicippio, unless Israel freed a senior Hizbollah cleric it had abducted from southern Lebanon a few weeks earlier. Mr Cicippio’s life was spared and he was later freed.

Most of the hostages were eventually released after years during which it was never known if they were dead or alive. Most spent long periods alone, shackled in squalid and mosquito-infested underground dungeons, able to hear children playing cheerfully outside, but a world away from them.

Some hostages died in captivity from illness, others as a result of torture.

Some met Collett’s likely fate, and were simply executed in cold blood.

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae