BEIRUT, 31 October 2004 — The head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement said yesterday there had been new German-brokered talks for the release of Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel. In January, Hezbollah and Israel concluded an exchange of hundreds of Lebanese and other Arab prisoners, including senior resistance figures, for a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers Hezbollah abducted in 2000.
A second stage of the deal was to focus on the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli airman who went missing over Lebanon in 1986, and deal with Samir Al-Qantar, the Lebanese held longest in Israel, which sentenced him to 542 years in jail for killing four Israelis in 1979. “The negotiations with German mediation are still on,” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told a rally in Beirut. “The rounds of negotiation continue, and meetings with the German mediator are happening.”
Beirut-based sources said in May that Arad was dead and that Hezbollah had his remains, but Nasrallah told makers of a German documentary film that Hezbollah had never held Arad and that he disappeared after being held by Lebanese Shiite Amal militiamen. That film cited papers of Germany’s BND intelligence service saying Arad had been held in a cave in Lebanon for four years before being turned over to an Iranian official in Lebanon in 1996, and eventually taken to Iran via Syria.
An Israeli Defense Ministry official said earlier this month that Arad was presumed alive and that Iran was deemed responsible for whatever had happened to him. Iran, along with Syria the main patron of the group that helped force Israel to withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation, denies knowledge of Arad’s fate.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s new Prime Minister Omar Karameh has denounced international efforts to distance his country from Syria and said he wanted peace with his political opponents, local media reported. “Our nation is going through a very delicate situation. Lebanon and Syria are subject to strong foreign pressure aimed at breaking tight links between our two countries,” Karameh was quoted as saying.
