The Guardian, BEIRUT
British investigators in Lebanon may be poised to solve a 25-year-old murder mystery after finding human remains believed to be of the journalist Alec Collett.
Collett, a freelance writer, was kidnapped at gunpoint in 1985 while working on an article for the UN about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The following year his captors released a poor quality videotape showing a hooded figure who had apparently been hanged, but who was never formally identified.
Collett was one of several Britons targeted by one of the deadliest terrorist organizations of the day, the renegade Palestinian Abu Nidal group, which was backed successively by Iraq and Libya.
The UK Foreign Office confirmed on Thursday that unidentified human remains had been found near Rashaya in the Beka’a valley in eastern Lebanon, once a stronghold for Palestinian groups. Operations were “ongoing” and it would take weeks before DNA identification could be made, a spokesman said.
The exhumation was carried out by a team of British police and forensic experts led by Lieutenant-Colonel Giles Taylor, the defense attache at the British embassy in Beirut. The searches in Lebanon began after a tip-off following previous abortive attempts made by the UN.
Abu Nidal claimed to have killed Collett, then 64, in revenge for a US air raid on Libya in April 1986, in which US warplanes flew from bases in the UK. The group also killed two other Britons, Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield, along with an American. It had earlier killed British officials in Greece and India.
Four years ago a former member of the group, Zaid Hassan Safarini, in prison in the US for an unrelated offense, described Collett’s death to the Sunday Times. He said the journalist was dragged from his cell, hooded and handcuffed, and shuffled toward a gallows.
As the rope was placed around Collett’s neck, he realized his fate, crying out: “What, what, no.”
Sabri al-Banna, the group’s leader, had reportedly thought that Collett could be swapped for three members jailed in the UK after the attempted assassination in 1982 of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London.
Collett was one of more than 80 foreigners who were taken hostage in Lebanon between 1984 and 1991. Fourteen were British nationals, including Terry Waite, the special envoy of the archbishop of Canterbury, and John McCarthy, then a TV reporter. Most were held by Lebanese Shiite groups with links to Iran.
The UN tried three times between 1995 and 2000 to find Collett’s body.
A spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency said yesterday: “New remains have been found and are being identified. We are in touch with the family and they will be the first to know if there are any new developments.”
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