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.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS