Report on Americans’ Imminent Release in Lebanon Unconfirmed

American and Red Cross officials say they have no information to confirm a Kuwaiti newspaper report that American and French kidnap victims in Lebanon would be freed soon.

But while there were conflicting reports on the release of the American and French hostages, a Lebanese employee of ABC News, Shakib Humaidan, was freed by his captors Wednesday less than a week after he was abducted, a network spokesman in New York reported.

“He was released in the past hour and is safe in Beirut,” ABC spokesman Tom Goodman said.

The report on the imminent release of the foreign hostages surfaced Tuesday in the Kuwaiti newspaper As Siyassah. The newspaper said Syria would arrange the release of five of the seven kidnaped Americans and three of the four kidnaped Frenchmen in order to steal the limelight from an Arab League summit, which opened Wednesday in Casablanca.

Syria and other leftist-governed Arab countries are boycotting the summit, which is scheduled to discuss an effort by Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization to form a delegation for preliminary talks with the United States leading to peace negotiations with Israel.

Despite the Kuwaiti reports, authorities said Wednesday that they knew nothing about an imminent hostage release.

In Washington on Wednesday, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said: “We don’t have any independent confirmation on that. We’re certainly always aware that in the Middle East things can happen, but we don’t have anything.”

In Geneva, officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross also said they had not been informed of any release.

“We have heard via press reports about the story from Kuwait, but we are not in the picture at all,” a Red Cross spokesman, Jean-Jacques Kurtz, said.

The American and French hostages are believed to be held somewhere in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a Syrian-controlled Shia Muslim stronghold.

The Kuwaiti newspaper did not explain why only five Americans and three Frenchmen were reportedly going to be freed.