Swedes kidnapped, released

Press, 13 February 1988, Page 12

Swedes kidnapped, released

NZPA-Reuter Beirut Pro-Iranian Muslim kidnappers hunting for West Germans briefly seized two Swedish journalists in Muslim West Beirut after mistaking them for Germans. Security sources said the incident underlined the dangers threatening West Germans in west Beirut. Muslim Shi’ite zealots are pressing Bonn to release two Lebanese Shi’ite brothers, Mohammed Ali and Abbas Ali Hamadi, in jail in West Germany. A photographer, Andre Lada, aged 45, and reporter Rideri Folke, aged

29, of the Swedish television news service, were taken from a taxi by six gunmen on the airport highway on Thursday after arriving to cover the abduction of two Scandinavian United Nations relief workers. The gunmen sped with the two - journalists towards a suburban bastion of pro-Iranian Hizbollah (Party of God) militants, but after the leader of their abductors had checked their passports and found they were Swedes he told them: “We’re very sorry, we thought you were West Germans. So we have to leave you and take you

back,” they said. They said the gunmen told them: “If you were West Germans, we would have (got)- one million dollars.”

A West German businessman, Rudolf Cordes, aged 53, has been held hostage in Lebanon for more than a year. The two were among about 20 Swedish and Norwegian journalists who flocked into west Beirut to cover the kidnapping of a Swede, Jan Stening, aged 44, and Norwegian William Joergensen, aged 57, who work for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (U.N.R.W.A.).