French Hostage ‘Will Probably Be Spared,’ Top Shia Cleric Predicts

Lebanon’s highest-ranking Shia Muslim religious authority said he is negotiating with the Muslim kidnapers of French hostage Jean-Louis Normandin and that Normandin “will probably be spared.”

Sheik Mohammed Mehdi Shamseddin, vice chairman of the Higher Shia Islamic Council, spoke shortly before a Monday night deadline, set by the kidnapers who threatened to execute Normandin, passed without word on the captive’s fate.

“I haven’t received firm pledges, but I can deduce from what was told to me and from contacts made by other parties that the French hostage will be saved,” Shamseddin, 60, was quoted as saying in an interview with the pro-Syrian Beirut newspaper Al Shark.

The Higher Shia Islamic Council governs Lebanon’s largest single sect. The council chairman, Imam Moussa Sadr, has been missing since a visit to Libya in 1978, making Shamseddin the nation’s highest Shia authority.

Normandin, 35, a television crewman, was kidnaped in Muslim West Beirut on March 8, 1986. The Revolutionary Justice Organization, believed made up of Shia extremists loyal to Iran, claimed responsibility.

The kidnapers said in a statement delivered at 8 p.m. Saturday to a local newspaper that they had put Normandin “on trial” and would “hand down the just sentence to execute him within 48 hours” unless France clarified its foreign policies.

The kidnapers cited French President Francois Mitterrand’s statement last week in which he appeared to reject the possibility of a pardon for terrorist Anis Naccache. Naccache, 33, is serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination in Paris of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar.