2 Unconfirmed Reports: Waite Shot, Sighted

A newspaper said in an unconfirmed report today that Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite was shot and critically wounded after he tried to escape his captors in Lebanon. Later another report said he was sighted in Beirut today.

The West German newspaper Bild said a guard opened fire on Waite with a machine gun when he tried to flee the room where he was being held.

Bild cited “Beirut security circles” as its source.

Later, two taxi drivers told the AP in Beirut that they saw Waite in a Beirut suburb today with an escort of about 10 gunmen and four Shia Muslim sheiks. They said Waite was walking with his escorts in a street close to the city’s airport highway at about 3 p.m.

“I saw him smiling and waving his hand to onlookers as he walked. He wore a gray raincoat,” said one witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I stopped my taxicab to watch, but the escorts waved me away, shouting: ‘Don’t stop. Drive on.’ I did.”

The Hamburg-based mass-circulation newspaper, which sometimes deals in sensationalism and gossip, did not say when or where the alleged shooting occurred. It provided no further details.

The Bild report, to appear in the newspaper’s Friday editions, was telexed in advance to news agencies in West Germany.

In Washington, White House spokesman Dan Howard said, “We have no independent confirmation of that.”

The Bild story was the latest of numerous often contradictory reports on the fate of Waite, who arrived in Beirut on Jan. 12 to help negotiate the release of foreign hostages and disappeared Jan. 20.