Hostage-Takers’ Leader Wants to End ‘Suffering’

The spiritual leader of a radical Muslim group believed to hold nine Americans hostage in Lebanon has written to those pressing for the captives’ release that he wants to see an end to the “human suffering,” recipients said today.

A State Department official who has seen the correspondence from Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said, “The letters themselves are unusual, but the content is not.” The official refused to be quoted by name.

Fadlallah, 53, is the spiritual guru of Hezbollah, an umbrella group of pro-Iranian Muslim Shiites. Elements within the Lebanese group actively employ terrorism and are thought to control the American hostages, U.S. officials say.

Fadlallah’s written statements, in Arabic, were in response to letters sent to him by Peggy Say, the sister of hostage Terry Anderson; the Journalists Committee to Free Terry Anderson; the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, and Ray Barnett, the head of Friends in the West and Ambassadors of Aid, two humanitarian groups in Seattle, Wash.

Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent in Beirut when he was kidnaped in March, 1985, has been held longer than any of the other American hostages.

Today, the wives of three American professors at Beirut University College, seized two years ago, appealed for the release of their husbands, who have begun their third year in captivity. The three men are Alann Steen of Boston, Robert Polhill of New York and Jesse Turner of Boise, Idaho.