Word: hizballah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Life has been like that for Terry Anderson ever since March 16, 1985, when the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press was kidnaped in West Beirut. The men who grabbed him, members of the Shi'ite Muslim fundamentalist group called Hizballah, were intent on swapping Western hostages for 17 comrades imprisoned in Kuwait for a terrorist spree. Four long years later, Anderson is still held hostage. From accounts by his former fellow captives, TIME has pieced together a glimpse of the life...
...secret who holds Terry Anderson. Imad Mughniyah is his name. He is a 38-year-old Lebanese leader of the Shi'ite fundamentalist group Hizballah whose history of terrorism is grislier than the record of Palestinian renegade Abu Nidal. Mughniyah's villainy, U.S. officials say, runs from bombings, like the suicide attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, to hijackings. He is a prime suspect in the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1985 skyjacking of TWA Flight 847 in which a Navy diver was murdered. And he has made a specialty of kidnaping: U.S. officials...
Muslim anger surfaced elsewhere, fueling American and British fears for the safety of their hostages. In Lebanon, two related pro-Iranian Shi'ite organizations, Hizballah and Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, both believed to be holding Western hostages, endorsed Khomeini's threat. Islamic Jihad issued a vow to seek revenge against "all those who take part in strong and ferocious campaigns against Islam." The statement was accompanied by a Polaroid photograph of the three American hostages, Alann Steen, Robert Polhill and Jesse Turner, who were kidnaped from the campus of Beirut University College more than two years...
...Britain intelligence officials believe they have identified the man holding Terry Waite, the Anglican envoy kidnaped 20 months ago while trying to negotiate the release of other hostages. He is Imad Mughniyah, Hizballah's head of security, whose brother-in-law Mustafa Youssef Badreddin is one of the Shi'ite terrorists serving prison terms in Kuwait...
Western diplomats have privately expressed hope that Iran will exert its leverage within Hizballah for further hostage releases, especially now that Tehran is seeking to emerge from diplomatic isolation and establish new ties with the West. But apparently that decision is not entirely to the liking of one high-ranking Iranian, namely Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranians, he said in a written message last week, must continue to "use their oppressor- burning flames against both the criminal Soviet Union and the world- devouring United States," looking "neither east nor west" for their future. His tone was hardly that of someone contemplating...