BEIRUT: Lebanese fighter Samir Qantar, freed from jail in Israel yesterday, had been serving multiple life sentences for a triple murder, including the brutal killing of a four-year-old girl, when he was 17. Qantar, now 45, has spent almost two-thirds of his life as a prisoner of Israel after his sentencing in January 1980 for the April 1979 killings of Danny Haran, his daughter Einat and an Israeli policeman.

Qantar, who had earned the title of longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel, was still a teenager when he and three other members of the Palestine Liberation Front infiltrated Nahariya by sea from Lebanon. Two resistance fighters were killed in a shoot-out with the Israeli forces, while Qantar — shot and wounded five times — was arrested along with the fourth member of the commando, Ahmad Abras.

Qantar and Abras were each sentenced to five life terms plus 47 years for murder. Abras was freed in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange between Israel and the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah has repeatedly demanded the release of Qantar, a Druze who was captured three years before the group was founded in 1982.

Israel said on Sunday it would release five Lebanese prisoners on Wednesday, including Qantar, in exchange for two soldiers captured by Hezbollah two years ago.

An Internet website devoted to campaigning for his release said that Qantar earned a degree in sociology from a Tel Aviv college in 1992.

“The courses were sent to him and he sent his home-works, or ‘cell-works’ back to the college,” it said.

“There isn’t a prison in Israel that Samir Qantar has not visited yet and been submitted to its means of torture,” the website said, adding that despite decades in detention his militant views have not changed. “To him, the detention center was just another place for battle.”

Qantar’s fate was often linked to that of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose warplane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 during the country’s civil war.

Israeli authorities have said information on Arad’s fate was a precondition for a swap with Hezbollah.