Sutherland Says He Tried Suicide 3 Times While He Was Held Hostage

Former hostage Thomas M. Sutherland said Wednesday he tried to kill himself three times while in captivity in Lebanon, but each time the vision of his wife and daughters kept him from going through with it.

The suicide attempts came in late 1986, when Sutherland’s captors in Beirut isolated him in a tiny, dark underground cell.

The captors “wouldn’t even give me a candle to eat by. They really were causing me a lot of grief and I thought to myself, ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with this, I’d sooner die,’ ” Sutherland, 60, said on ABC’s “Nightline.”

“And so I tried to pull a plastic bag over my head and suffocate myself, but I found out on each try that it got very painful and as it got more painful, the vision of my wife and three daughters appeared before me ever more clearly.

“And I decided each time, ‘Gee, I can’t go through with this,’ and I would pull it off,” he said. “Now, of course, I’m glad I did that.”

Sutherland, who was released Nov. 18 after more than six years in captivity, said the conditions were the worst of his ordeal. He said other hostages suffered in similar cells nearby.

“We were being, I think, somewhat punished for a misunderstanding really concerning the tape that David Jacobsen had made,” Sutherland said.

On a tape his captors released, fellow hostage Jacobsen offered his condolences to the wife of American William Buckley, who was killed by his Islamic Jihad captors. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, wasn’t married, prompting speculation in the United States that Jacobsen was trying to sneak out a message.