NATION : Rites Hail Hostage’s Birthday

The family and friends of Lebanon captive Terry Anderson celebrated his 42nd birthday today at a “Mass of Hope” where a journalistic colleague, Tom Brokaw, said, “As long as he is a hostage, we are not free.”

Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, has spent five birthdays in captivity since gunmen seized him on a Beirut street on March 16, 1985.

But his sister, Peggy Say, said that ceremonies of the kind held today at Georgetown University’s Dahlgren Chapel have made sure he has not been forgotten.

Prominent journalists such as Ben Bradlee, Peter Arnett and R. W. Apple, along with representatives of the State Department and the embassies of Lebanon, Algeria and Syria attended the hourlong Mass in the small chapel.