U.S. Hostages in Lebanon Slain, One Caller Declares

An anonymous caller said Islamic Jihad extremists plan to kill their half a dozen American hostages today, and a second caller claimed that they are dead. But no bodies were found in the designated spot.

The captives were to be “executed” by firing squad because indirect negotiations with the United States had reached “a dead end,” the first man said in a call to a Western news agency.

In Washington, however, a White House official said contacts in the Lebanon hostage case had not broken down. And President Reagan said of the death threat, “Evidently there is no substantiation of that at all.”

Since the calls could not be authenticated, it was impossible to determine whether they were a macabre hoax or simply part of a war of nerves being waged by the shadowy Shia Muslim faction to pressure Washington into making a deal.

Six Americans are missing in Lebanon. Islamic Jihad claimed Oct. 4 that it had killed one of them, diplomat William Buckley, 57. But no body has turned up.

Other Captives

The other American captives are Peter Kilburn, 60, an American University of Beirut librarian; Father Lawrence Jenco, 50, a Roman Catholic priest; Terry Anderson, 38, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press; David Jacobsen, director of the American University Hospital, and Thomas Sutherland, the university’s dean of agriculture.

Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Holy War, believed made up of fundamentalist followers of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had said it would release the Americans when Kuwait freed 17 Shia comrades serving prison terms for the bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in December, 1983. Kuwait refuses.

Several threats were made earlier to try the hostages as spies and “execute” them if the demand was not met. But no deadlines were set. In some other Lebanon abduction cases, calls reporting supposed “executions” have turned out to be false.

2 Calls, 2 Languages

A representative of a Western news agency, which declined to be identified, said today’s first call came at 7:15 a.m. from a man who, speaking classical Arabic, declared that the American hostages would be shot by firing squad.

He promised to call again at 1 p.m. local time to say where the bodies had been dumped. That call was never made. But another man, speaking colloquial Lebanese Arabic, called the agency at 10 a.m.

He said that “all the bodies of the Americans, including Buckley’s,” had been dumped in the basement of the derelict, shell-pocked Coca-Cola factory in the Kola district of south Beirut.

But policemen, reporters and Muslim militiamen found nothing after several hours of searching.