British Hostage Is Dead, Wife Told : Reports Receiving ‘Bad News’ in Call, Meeting in Beirut

The wife of missing Briton Jack Mann, a World War II fighter pilot, said today she had been told he died and that she believed the report to be true.

Mann, 75, disappeared May 12 as he drove to a bank in Syrian-policed Muslim West Beirut.

None of Lebanon’s kidnap groups has specifically identified him as a hostage. But a previously unknown faction, the Cells of Armed Struggle, claimed that it kidnaped an unidentified Briton in Beirut the day Mann disappeared.

It demanded the release of Arabs jailed in Britain for the 1987 killing of Palestinian cartoonist Ali Naji al-Adhami. But Scotland Yard said no arrests had been made in that slaying.

There had been no word since then about Mann’s whereabouts.

His wife, Sunny, said she received a telephone call Monday from an unidentified man who told her: “I have bad news about your husband.”

She said she later met the man at a shop in West Beirut’s Hamra commercial thoroughfare and “he told me that Jack is dead.”

“I waited, but there was no news about Jack on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday,” Mann told reporters at her West Beirut apartment.

“I don’t know. There’s no proof that he’s dead at the moment,” she said. But she noted that the report of her husband’s alleged death “seems correct.”

The Manns lived in Beirut for 43 years. He worked as a pilot with Lebanon’s national airline, Middle East Airlines, for more than 20 years before retiring to manage a bar in Beirut.

He was one of 16 Westerners missing in Lebanon. Most are held hostage by pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim militants. The other Westerners are eight Americans, three Britons, two West Germans, an Italian and an Irishman.