Wait for two French girls

Press, 28 December 1988, Page 8

Wait for two French girls

NZPA-Reuter Beirut The whereabouts of two French girls remained unknown in spite of announcement by their Palestinian kidnappers that they had freed them as a Christmas gesture after more than a year in captivity.

“The two children are released and they will be in Paris in the next few hours,” Walid Khaled, an official of Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council told reporters at his offices in Muslim west Beirut yesterday.

He said the two girls, Marie-Laure Valente, aged 7, and her sister, Virginie, aged 6, might arrrive at Orly Airport, but hours after his declaration the two children had not appeared. The F.R.C. said in November, 1987, it had seized the girls with their French mother, Jacqueline Valente, and five Belgians from a yacht named Silco off the Israeli-occu-pied Gaza Strip.

Mr Khaled said he had advised the girls’ father, Pascal Betille, who was in

west Beirut at the weekend with Jacqueline Valente’s mother and her brother-in-law, Andre Metral, to return as “quickly as possible to Paris to receive them.”

They all returned to Paris yesterday hours before Mr Khaled announced the girls’ release.

“All we know is that they are going to be freed shortly, but ... it will not be today. We are still waiting now. No, it will not be tonight,” Mr Metral told French radio. Mr Khaled assured the

girls’ relatives on Sunday they would be freed soon after being taken to a safe place outside Lebanon. He did not say from where they were flying. Beirut Airport sources said they might have left from Libya or Algeria.

Mr Khaled said the decision to free them was a Christmas gesture prompted by an appeal from the Libyan leader, Colonel . Muammar Gadaffi. He would not say whether they would be released in Libya, which backs the radical group.