Offers to Free Hostages Sent, Hezbollah Says

The kidnapers of the American hostages in Lebanon have forwarded proposals for their release to U.S. officials, a leader of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement was quoted as saying in an interview published Sunday.

Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah gave no details of the proposals and said no negotiations had started, according to the report.

“What has taken place so far is that mediators have presented ideas to the United States according to proposals put forward by the kidnapers,” said Fadlallah, who has insisted in the past that his militantly fundamentalist organization has no contact with the kidnapers and knows nothing about the hostages.

In another Sunday development, a pro-Iranian group said that it would consider killing its two American hostages if the French navy intervenes in Lebanon, the Associated Press reported.

The Shiite Muslim group, which calls itself the Revolutionary Justice Organization, made the threat in a statement delivered to the independent newspaper An Nahar and a Western news agency in Beirut, the AP said. The statement was accompanied by a photocopy of a photograph that the group released Aug. 1 of American hostage Edward A. Tracy.

The group, one of several Lebanese Hezbollah factions believed to hold foreigners captive, also holds American hostage Joseph J. Cicippio. It recently threatened to kill Cicippio unless Israel released Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, a Shiite Muslim clergyman and regional Hezbollah leader it kidnaped in southern Lebanon. The group later suspended the threat.

“America, which is spurring France, should realize that any foolhardiness by the French fleet will expose the life of its hostages to danger,” the statement said.

No Intention of Intervening

France has sent an aircraft carrier and escort ships to the eastern Mediterranean, reportedly to evacuate 7,000 French nationals from war-battered Lebanon if the need arises, and President Francois Mitterrand said Sunday that his nation has no intention of intervening in Lebanon.

An agreement between the United States and France on Lebanon policy has led to earlier attacks by Shiite extremists. Within five minutes of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which killed 241 American military personnel, a battalion compound of the French contingent of a multinational force was also hit by a suicide bomber, killing 58.

The reported comments by Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Hezbollah, or Party of God, were published in Al Ittihad. It is the largest circulation newspaper in Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf, but an obscure periodical in the Arab world. Initial accounts of the interview did not say when or where it took place, but there have been no reports that Fadlallah has left his home in southern Beirut since the hostage crisis began three weeks ago.

Diplomatic Curtain Drawn

Public statements by officials diminished sharply after the dramatic first week of the crisis, which was triggered by the Israeli abduction of Obeid and the execution-style killing, reportedly in retaliation, of American hostage William R. Higgins, a Marine lieutenant colonel, by Shiite radicals identified with Fadlallah’s movement.

When the subsequent death threat against Cicippio was suspended, the curtains of diplomacy and secrecy were drawn across presumed contacts among the parties involved. In Washington and the Middle East, informed observers began using the same phrase, “The bazaar is open,” meaning the fate and possible freedom of the 14 remaining Western hostages, including eight Americans, had moved into the dark arena of quiet bargaining. “This is a war of nerves,” Eitan Haber, a spokesman for Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said.

Over the weekend, Pakistan’s foreign minister, identified two weeks ago by the influential Tehran Times as a likely mediator in the crisis, visited the Iranian capital and then went on to Damascus, Syria. Sahabzada Yaqub Khan met in the Syrian capital with President Hafez Assad and in Tehran with Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s new president.

Trip to Washington

In neither capital did the Pakistani envoy speak to the press about his mission, which reports from Damascus say will now take him to Washington. According to press reports from Iran, however, Rafsanjani reportedly told Yaqub Khan: “I have said many times that if the United States expects us to help in the Lebanese (hostage) issue, it should show in practice that it has dropped its hostile stand against us. (Then) we will be inclined to solve the issue.”

According to the Tehran press reports, Rafsanjani specifically mentioned Iran’s demand that the United States release several billion dollars in impounded Iranian assets and pressure the Israelis to free Obeid. The Tehran Times said Washington should take “practical steps.”

Fadlallah was quoted as saying in the Al Ittihad interview that Iran could be instrumental in the bargaining for the release of the hostages, although he remarked that “such negotiations have not yet started . . . (and) they could last more than six months (when they do).”

In interviews with The Times in Damascus last week, Syrian analysts and foreign diplomats foresaw a lengthy process. “This is a delicate matter. One cannot use force,” a Syrian official remarked. He said his government, under pressure from Washington to help resolve the crisis, is treating it as a “humanitarian matter, but one that should be solved sooner rather than later.”

A Western diplomatic observer said the hostage issue “is being intensely discussed” within the Damascus government. Times staff writer Robin Wright, in Washington, contributed to this story.