2 More Seized by Kidnapers in Lebanon

Two more Westerners, a British U.N. employee and a Frenchman, were kidnaped in Lebanon on Monday.

Alec Collett, who was working for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees as an information consultant, was kidnaped just outside Beirut, while Gilles Peyrolles, director of the French Cultural Center in Tripoli, was seized in that northern port city.

A radical group claimed responsibility for kidnaping Peyrolles and demanded that France free a colleague suspected of the murder of an American military attache and an Israeli ambassador. Collett’s kidnapers were not immediately known.

Monday’s kidnapings brought to 14 the number of foreigners believed to have been abducted by various groups in Lebanon in the last 15 months. The figure includes five Americans.

Collett, 63, on a three-month assignment in Lebanon for the U.N. agency, was abducted by gunmen near Khalde, south of Beirut, U.N. spokesman John Defrates said.

Car Is Overtaken

Defrates said Collett and an Austrian colleague, Fritz Heindl, were approaching Beirut from the south when their car was overtaken by a green Volvo that forced them to stop.

The two men were forced into the other car and driven back to Khalde, where Heindl was freed. The gunmen then drove off with Collett. “It looks as though Collett was kidnaped because he is British,” Defrates commented.

Collett, who lives in New York, was due to return home at the end of April.

A police source in Tripoli, 42 miles north of Beirut, said a group of armed men stormed the home of Peyrolles shortly after midnight, singled him out from his roommates and took him away.

A message delivered to a foreign news agency in Beirut said Peyrolles, 32, is being held by a group calling itself the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions.

Six Attacks, Four Deaths

The Revolutionary Factions group has claimed responsibility for six attacks on U.S. and Israeli diplomats in France since 1981 that resulted in at least four deaths. French investigators have been quoted as saying they believe that it consists of about a dozen people from a single Christian village in northern Lebanon.

The handwritten message demanded the release within 48 hours of Abdel-Kader Saadi, a comrade jailed in France, in return for Peyrolles’ freedom.

According to French police, Saadi was arrested Oct. 24 in the French city of Lyon while using the name Abdallah Georges Ibrahim. He is being held in Lyon on charges of carrying a false passport.

Saadi, a member of the Revolutionary Factions, is suspected of involvement in the murder of U.S. military attache Charles Ray and Israeli diplomat Yaacov Barsimantov in Paris in 1982. The Revolutionary Factions group has claimed responsibility for Ray’s death.

Warning to Italians

In demanding that France release Saadi, the group also warned Italy to free from jail two of its other members, Abdullah Mansouri and Josephine Abdo Sarkis, or face similar action.

Monday’s kidnapings came three days after the abduction in predominantly Muslim West Beirut of French Vice Consul Marcel Fontaine, French Embassy attache Marcel Carton and his daughter, Danielle Perez, an embassy secretary. The previous week, two Britons and an American journalist were kidnaped.

The shadowy Muslim terrorist group known as Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War) claims to be holding all six. The organization is believed to be made up of fundamentalist Shia Muslims with ties to Iran’s revolutionary patriarch, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.