Lebanese Militia Leader Offers Captured Israel Pilot for 400 Palestinian Prisoners

A Lebanese militia leader offered Saturday to exchange a captured Israeli pilot for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and he appealed for the freedom of three Americans and an Indian being held under threat of death in Beirut.

Nabih Berri, who heads the Shia Muslim militia Amal, also told reporters in Damascus, Syria, that he expects Terry Waite, a Church of England envoy who has been missing since Jan. 20 in Lebanon, to be freed “very soon.”

Berri’s exchange proposal was just the latest twist in a bizarre hostage drama being played out in West Beirut, including behind-the-scenes negotiations involving Syria and Iran as well as the movement of American ships in the Mediterranean off the Lebanese coast.

Recalls TWA Hijacking

The crisis has become eerily reminiscent of the seizure of a TWA airliner in 1985 when Shia Muslim hijackers killed one American and held 39 others hostage, demanding that Israel free hundreds of Lebanese from prison. The Americans were eventually released, and Israel released and repatriated to Lebanon several hundred prisoners over a period of several weeks. Jerusalem denied, however, that it had made a deal to free the prisoners in exchange for the TWA passengers and crew.

The latest hostage crisis began with the abduction on Jan. 24 of four professors at the campus of Beirut University College. The four include three Americans, Jesse Turner, Alann Steen and Robert Polhill, as well as an Indian academic, Mithilesher Singh.

A group calling itself Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine has threatened to kill the four men Monday unless Israel agrees to release 400 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

Sit-in Protest

About 400 students and parents staged a sit-in at the college to protest the abduction. The protesters, led by the wives of the abducted teachers, carried a banner proclaiming, “Grab Your Education, and Grab It Now.”

Israeli authorities announced last week that they would not negotiate the release of the prisoners, but that was before Berri’s offer to swap them for the Israeli airman, who was captured last year during an air raid on Palestinian positions near the Lebanese port of Sidon.

There was no immediate reaction from Jerusalem to Berri’s proposal. Observers recalled that a storm of protest was raised in Israel when three Israel soldiers were retrieved more than a year ago in a swap for several hundred Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been convicted of terrorism against the Jewish state.

Riding on Notoriety

The Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine had never been heard of before the well-executed kidnaping of the four professors, who were abducted from the college campus by gunmen posing as police officers. There is speculation that the group is made up of Palestinians capitalizing on the notoriety of Islamic Jihad, a shadowy, pro-Iranian group that has claimed responsibility for a rash of kidnapings of foreigners in Lebanon.

Berri on Saturday said that “I undertake to work for the freedom of the 400 Palestinians and other Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for the release of the Israeli airman held by Amal.”

He added that he has asked Palestinian guerrilla groups in Lebanon to supply him with lists of Palestinians in Israeli jails whom they want to exchange.

The militia leader’s offer came at an awkward moment, since Amal has been engaged in daily warfare with Palestinian groups in three Lebanese cities, with casualties in the hundreds.

Berri also appealed “to the abductors . . . (of) the American professors to release them forthwith.”