3 Frenchmen May Have Details on U.S. Hostages

The three French hostages released by Islamic extremists Tuesday night in Beirut apparently possess a wealth of information about Americans held captive with them that U.S. officials believe may prove helpful in winning their freedom.

U.S. officials, who have interviewed French hostages freed in the past, have sought authorization to question the three men as soon as their health permits.

Two of the hostages released Tuesday, Marcel Carton and Jean-Paul Kauffmann, expressed to reporters here a deep concern for the nine American and nine other Western hostages they came into contact with during their three years of captivity.

“This is my main concern,” Kauffmann said Friday in an interview with Agence France-Presse, the French news agency.

Kauffmann, 43, a magazine reporter abducted May 22, 1985, refused to divulge details about the other hostages, apparently fearing this could lead to harm against them. But he said he and his fellow hostages were kept in chains day and night in what he called “Dante’s hell.”

Carton, 64, identified as a diplomat, said he played chess and dominoes with American hostage Terry A. Anderson during part of his three years in confinement. Anderson, 40, was chief Middle East correspondent of the Associated Press when he was kidnaped March 16, 1985.

Kauffmann said he was moved 18 times and each time he had to renegotiate how his jailers treated him. Some of the guards were considerate and other were cruel, including one who went by the name Abu Ali. “He left us in the dirt, because for him we were impure. He went on and on with humiliations, not to mention a sham execution in June, 1987.”

“The least little change had a considerable repercussion on our . . . morale. A cup of coffee was a real feast. A bottle of Pepsi-Cola, a drink that I had forbidden to my children and that we were offered two or three times a month, was a real gift from heaven.”

When the Syrian Army moved back into Beirut last year, Kauffmann recalled, he was bound with tape and closed into a coffin-like container fixed under a truck. For three hours, on the way to southern Lebanon, he was confined in the box unable to breathe normally.

They told me, ‘If you continue to shout, we will kill you.’ And I answered, ‘Kill me. Kill me. I don’t care.’ That was the only time I really didn’t care about my own death.”

Kauffmann said he prayed often and read the Bible again and again “with new eyes.” In addition, he said, he read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” 21 times.