British Newsman Fights Free After Abduction in West Beirut

A British journalist was abducted today in West Beirut but ignored a gunman’s threat to shoot him if he did not submit and kicked his way to freedom from his kidnapers’ car.

Correspondent David Hirst of the Guardian newspaper, the longest-serving Western correspondent in Beirut, said he was seized by three gunmen on the Muslim side of the Mreijeh crossing on the Lebanese capital’s dividing Green Line at 6:45 a.m.

He said that the taxi he was riding in got a flat tire and that the driver and an escort of three Druze militiamen were changing it when the gunmen approached the vehicle. They asked him who he was, then pulled him from the car.

He said that he resisted but that the gunmen shoved him into the back seat of a BMW automobile, blindfolded him and sped off. He said a gun was pressed against his left temple.

‘As Much Noise as I Could’

“I shouted. I tried to make as much noise as I could, especially when the car stopped or slowed down at traffic jams,” said the silver-haired, 48-year-old Hirst at the office of a Western news agency in West Beirut after his hourlong ordeal.

The journalist said one of the kidnapers threatened to shoot him if he did not stop kicking and shouting.

“I managed to remove the blindfold. I only had it for half a minute,” he said.

He said that the kidnapers eventually stopped the car at a “concrete hovel house,” apparently their destination, in a Shia Muslim southern suburb of Beirut and that one gunman got out and stepped to the back door.

“At this moment, I kicked and struggled and managed to detach myself and ran away,” said Hirst, visibly shaken, the red scratches on his face testifying to his struggle.

‘They Did Not Shoot’

“But when I ran away, they did not shoot. I found myself in an alleyway, where I grabbed a taxicab and made it back to town,” he said.

Hirst, who has lived in Beirut 25 years, said he was on his way from his seafront apartment in West Beirut’s Ein el Mreisseh district to Christian East Beirut on an assignment when he was abducted.

He said the gunmen claimed to be from the security department of Justice Minister Nabih Berri’s Shia Amal militia and told him that they wanted to question him.

“They pretended to be Amal. They didn’t appear to belong to any of the local militias. They were zoran, “ said Hirst, using the Arabic word for thugs.

‘Very Unpleasant’

Asked whether he will now leave Lebanon, he said: “I think I will stay on in Beirut. I haven’t made up my mind yet. . . . It was a very unpleasant experience.”

At least three kidnaped Britons have been killed in Lebanon during the past 18 months.

Hirst, one of three British reporters based in Beirut, became the second British journalist to escape his captors in Lebanon. Jonathan Wright of the Reuters news agency escaped after two weeks of captivity in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley during the summer of 1984.

Hirst, whose London-based newspaper is a liberal daily with a circulation of about 500,000, is a veteran reporter of Middle East wars and the author of a history of Arab-Israeli conflict titled “The Gun and the Olive Branch.”