The Lebanese Shiite Amal Movement has denied Israeli reports that its security chief disclosed details of the abduction and killing of an American army colonel to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), reported the Daily Star.
Video footage taken by the FBI six years ago and aired for the first time on Israeli television Friday, showed Mustafa Dirani, detained in Israel since 1994, denying any role in the kidnapping and killing of US Marine Colonel William Higgins, but naming another activist in Amal, Daoud Daoud, as having been involved.
Higgins, who was the commanding officer of the Observer Group Lebanon, part of the UN Truce Supervision Organization, was kidnapped Feb. 17, 1988.
Amal denied the veracity of the footage, saying that Dirani’s video confession was a “malicious rumor,” according to the paper.
“It’s well-known that Daoud had no information or connection to the Higgins incident.”
A UNIFIL officer told the paper that Daoud had been Amal’s senior liaison to the peacekeeping force and was assassinated in 1990 for helping the UN search for Higgins.
According to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth claimed it killed Higgins in July 1989 after Israeli commandos kidnapped a senior Hizbollah cleric, Sheik Abdel-Karim Obeid, from his house.
Dirani was snatched by Israeli helicopter-borne commandos in 1994 from his home in Kfar Nabha, Bekaa, to seek information on a missing Israeli air force navigator, Captain Ron Arad, whose F-4 Phantom was shot down in south Lebanon in October 1986.
Both Dirani and Obeid originally were held as bargaining chips for Arad’s return – Albawaba.com
