Hezbollah says missing Israeli airman died in 1988 | World | Reuters

Hezbollah says missing Israeli airman died in 1988 | World | Reuters: "Hezbollah says missing Israeli airman died in 1988
Wed Oct 8, 2008 10:35am BST

Email | Print |
Share
| Single Page | Recommend (0)
[-] Text [+]

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli airman captured in Lebanon in 1986 escaped two years later but probably died while trying to reach Israel on foot, the Hezbollah guerrilla group said in a report published by an Israeli newspaper on Wednesday.

Hezbollah gave Israel the secret report on Ron Arad's fate as part of a U.N.-mediated prisoner swap in July. That deal went ahead though Israel, which officially assumes Arad to be alive, dismissed the Hezbollah report as 'absolutely unsatisfactory.'

Arad was seized by Shi'ite militiamen after bailing out of his crippled warplane over Lebanon. Israel's Maariv daily quoted the Hezbollah report as saying that Arad was first held in Beirut and then moved to the eastern village of Nabi Cheit.

'The Israeli pilot escaped from his holding cell on the night between May 4-5, 1988 and headed south, towards what was then the occupied (Israeli) security zone' in south Lebanon, the Hezbollah report said, according to Maariv's front-page story.

'He was in a remote, mountainous and barren area where people rarely set foot. It is possible that he collapsed and, because of natural fact"