Word: pro-iranian
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Another American hostage, Jesse Turner, 44, was released in Beirut last week, and once again the process followed a familiar pattern. One of the pro-Iranian Lebanese groups provided new evidence concerning the fate of one of the five Israeli soldiers still unaccounted for in Lebanon. Jerusalem responded by ordering the release of 15 Lebanese Shi'ite prisoners. That gesture, in turn, led to the freeing of Turner, a former mathematics professor who had been held for four years and nine months...
...maneuvering was under way in Madrid, Israeli jets bombed a stronghold of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah, or Party of God, in southern Lebanon, Lebanese authorities said...
...unravel months of careful diplomacy by U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Last week the prospects for an end to the seven-year- old hostage insanity looked more promising than ever. In exchange for the release of 51 prisoners and nine bodies, Israel received firm confirmation from the pro-Iranian Hizballah of the death of one of its seven missing servicemen and inconclusive evidence of the death of another. Through a separate channel, Israel also secured the remains of a soldier in exchange for allowing a deported Palestinian militant to return to the West Bank...
While the contours of the deal seemed clear, the mechanics posed nettlesome questions. Among the most vexing was a condition contained in the letter former British hostage John McCarthy brought to Perez de Cuellar from Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist Shi'ite faction, operating under the banner of the pro-Iranian Hizballah, that holds several Westerners. It called for "the release of our freedom fighters from prisons in occupied Palestine and Europe." To whom that referred was anybody's guess -- and for whom Islamic Jihad presumed to speak was no more apparent. Was this a bargaining point or an implacable demand...
...uneasy silence, punctuated by occasional threats about the fate of the remaining 12 Western hostages? And who orchestrated McCarthy's release: Iran? Syria? His captors? As ever, there was a stated trade-off. Islamic Jihad, a radical Shi'ite cell that operates beneath the larger umbrella of the pro-Iranian Hizballah, armed McCarthy with a sealed letter addressed to U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. It is believed to call for the release of 300 Shi'ites from southern Lebanon and the release of 75 more prisoners held in Israel, among them the spiritual leader Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid...