Belgian Hostage Freed by S. Lebanon Captors

Citing a good-will appeal by Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, a clandestine Lebanese group Thursday freed a Belgian doctor who was kidnaped and taken hostage 13 months ago while doing relief work in southern Lebanon.

Jan Cools, 33, said after his release that he was treated “reasonably well” by his captors, but in a later interview, he charged that he was treated “in a bad and nasty manner.”

Cools, who worked with the Norwegian Aid Committee, was freed by a little-known group that calls itself the Soldiers of Justice and taken to the house of a local militia leader in the southern port of Sidon, 25 miles south of Beirut.

“I feel very happy, but I am tired,” he said at a news conference there. He also thanked “especially Col. Moammar Kadafi for getting me released.”

Looking healthy but haggard, Cools said he was treated well in captivity. “I was never hurt . . ., they were never aggressive to me,” he said.

But after leaving the militia leader’s home, Cools told a Belgium Radio correspondent in Flemish, “I was treated in a bad and nasty manner.” He did not elaborate.

Cools later was driven to the Damascus home of Belgian Ambassador Andre Vokaer.

Cools was kidnaped May 21, 1988, after he left his apartment in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh near the southern city of Tyre. Seven months later, the Soldiers of Justice said it kidnaped the physician and accused him of being a spy for Israel.

On Wednesday, the group said in a statement that it would release Cools “in response to calls by our brotherly leader” Kadafi and after mediation by a radical Palestinian group, the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

News reports had earlier suggested that Cools was held by the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist group. Police in Lebanon said that Soldiers of Justice is a name used by followers of Abu Nidal.