The World - News from June 23, 1989

A former hostage said he sweltered in 111-degree heat in a sealed room during part of his 13-month captivity in Lebanon and kept track of time by reading the expiration date on yogurt containers. When a guard told Jan Cools, 32, a Belgian doctor, to leave his tiny cell on June 14, he thought: “They are going to shoot me.” Despite his ordeal, Cools told a Brussels news conference that he is ready to return to Lebanon if his safety is guaranteed. “I have seen so much misery and distress that hundreds of doctors could work for hundreds of years to help,” he said of the conditions in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.