He Has Kidnapers’ Assurances, Palestinian Leader Says : Hostages: Popular Front’s Jibril says Shiite groups promised him that no captives will be freed unless thousands of his people held by Israel are released.

Palestinian guerrilla leader Ahmed Jibril said Wednesday that he has received assurances from Shiite Muslim leaders in Lebanon that no Israeli or Western hostages will be released without the concurrent release of thousands of Palestinian detainees in Israel.

Jibril, the shadowy figurehead of the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, said he has evidence that three Israeli servicemen missing since 1982 are alive and has personally spoken with Ron Arad, an Israeli air force navigator shot down over Lebanon in 1986.

Jibril’s announcement, although accompanied by no evidence, is one of the first indications from sources connected to the kidnaping groups that as many as three of the seven missing Israelis may still be alive.

But Palestinian attempts to join the hostage-bargaining process could delay efforts to reach a settlement because Jibril’s demands include more than 14,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails as a result of offenses committed during the 3 1/2-year-old uprising in the occupied territories.

Jibril, in a rare interview at his Damascus headquarters, said he met last week in Lebanon with the leadership of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim umbrella organization that is widely believed to control the kidnaping groups, and discussed a “package deal” that would include not only Lebanese Shiite captives but Palestinian prisoners, as well.

Jibril said Palestinians have asserted their right to participate in any blanket hostage-swap agreement because of the Jibril group’s purported help in freeing Lebanese Shiite prisoners held by Israel in 1979 and 1985.

“The Lebanese brothers now are morally obliged that the whole deal should be a package deal. We have a close relationship with Hezbollah,” Jibril said.

At last week’s meeting in Lebanon, he said: “They (Hezbollah leaders) asserted the fact that there would be no procedures without having an agreement (with us) beforehand. . . . Without Palestinians, there will be no deal for the hostages and no political agreement, as well.”

Jibril said he is preparing to release an audiotape of a conversation he had with the downed Israeli pilot within the last few months in which, he said, he and Arad discussed the Old Testament and “political and ideological issues.”

“I know they are alive. I myself have seen Ron,” he said of the Israeli captives. “If I have real information about them, I will disclose it, but everything has its price.”

A Syrian official said this week that the focus in hostage negotiations has turned, in part, to Palestinian groups because they may have some control over some of the hostages.

“The Hezbollah are ready to hand over what they have, but what they don’t have they can’t talk about,” he said.

Three of the missing Israeli soldiers, Sgt. Tzvi Felman, Sgt. Zechariah Baumel and Cpl. Yehuda Katz, captured in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley during the 1982 Israeli invasion, have alternately been reported to be in the hands of Saika, a small, Syrian-backed Palestinian extremist group, and Jibril’s group.

Jibril has denied that Palestinians hold any of the hostages but said they are in the hands of “revolutionary groups” close to Hezbollah. The hostages may have been handed from group to group, and some sources said it is possible that pro-Syrian Palestinian groups may indeed have a say in the eventual outcome of the hostage crisis. Or, some said, Jibril may simply be attempting to hitch onto the evolving hostage negotiations in an attempt to secure a place in the deal.

Jibril’s relations with Syria have reportedly been strained in recent months, and Syrian officials have been eager to move the hostage-release process forward as a way of bettering their relations with the West.

His relations with Iran and Iranian-backed groups, however, have been good.

Jibril met last week in Damascus with Iran’s visiting interior minister, Abdullah Nouri, and with the head of the Beirut-based Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shikaki. (Shikaki’s organization, with roots in the Israeli-occupied territories, is not the Islamic Jihad that is believed to be holding American hostages Terry A. Anderson and Thomas M. Sutherland and Anglican church envoy Terry Waite.)

It was Jibril’s organization that helped negotiate the exchange of 1,150 jailed Palestinians in exchange for three Israeli soldiers in 1985. Jibril himself is believed to have been the target of an unsuccessful Israeli kidnaping attempt in December, 1988, a few months before Israeli commandos captured a prominent Shiite Muslim leader, Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, in Lebanon.

Jibril, whose organization has broken away from the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization, has refused to renounce armed struggle and was named by several U.S. terrorism investigators as the initial suspect in the bombing of a Pan American Airways Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that killed 259 people.

Recently, investigators have said they now suspect Libyan-backed terrorists of carrying out the bombing. Jibril, who has long angrily denied the allegations against him, was bitter.

“First of all, I feel pity that American society and the international community has thrown the blame on the PFLP-GC,” he said. “All of a sudden, they shifted and acquitted us. The question is whether the U.S. Administration feels shame or not, and how the American people can any longer respect the Administration, because it is really throwing blame haphazardly.”

Jibril’s headquarters, in a tree-lined Damascus residential district heavily protected by uniformed, Kalashnikov-armed guards, is filled with photographs of Palestinian martyrs and the insignia of two crossed guns over a map of Palestine.

White pigeons fluttered in a cage on the sunny patio outside his office, and Jibril himself appeared cheerful and relaxed, although his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

“We are not for the concept of any human being having his freedom taken away,” he said.

Jibril said his meetings with Hezbollah leaders outlined a proposal for a two-stage hostage release in which civilian hostages, both Western and Arab, would be released in the first stage and military prisoners of war would be released as a second step.

However, the Popular Front leader said that in his view, it would not be sufficient to trade the 10 remaining Western hostages for Sheik Obeid. Civilian prisoners released, he said, should include what he claims are up to 18,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails as a result of the intifada , the Arab uprising.

The second stage of the release, he said, would include the release of the three Israeli servicemen allegedly still alive in exchange for 375 Arab prisoners being held by an Israeli-controlled militia in southern Lebanon. Arab prisoners being held in Europe would also have to be included in the swap, he said.

Jibril did not specify which of the seven missing Israelis besides Arad are still alive.

The Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine says it has the remains of the seventh Israeli, Sgt. Samir Assad, a Druze soldier kidnaped in Sidon, Lebanon, in April, 1983.

Jibril claims that there are actually 14 Western hostages awaiting release, not the 10 widely mentionedby Western investigators. “The hostage-takers have told us they are holding 14,” he said.

Background: Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was born in 1937 in the village of Yazur in what was then Palestine. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, his family moved to Syria, where he attended military college and became a demolition expert. He helped found the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the 1960s. He joined forces with George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1967. Soon, he formed an offshoot, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The group received financial support from Iran and was also linked with Syria and Libya. His group reportedly bombed Swissair Flight 330 in 1970, killing all 47 crew members and passengers. In a well-publicized act, two of his men flew in motorized hang gliders from Lebanon to an Israeli army base in November, 1987, then killed six Israeli soldiers and wounded seven others. In March, 1989, Jibril vowed to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses.”

Source: Times Wire Services