Beirut Doctor’s Wife Challenges Captors
BEIRUT — The wife of kidnaped Lebanese Jewish doctor Elie Hallak challenged his captors Thursday to prove he had spied for Israel.
A Shia Muslim group, the Organization of the Oppressed in the World, said last week that it had executed Hallak as an Israeli spy. His body has not been found.
“I and my family call on the Organization of the Oppressed in the World to produce evidence against my husband and produce his tape-recorded confessions if he really confessed,†Rachel Hallak wrote from Paris to Beirut’s An Nahar newspaper.
Hallak was abducted last March in the former Jewish quarter of West Beirut, where he was known as “doctor of the poor†for his work among Shia refugees.
His kidnapers said they would hand over his body if Israeli troops would withdraw from southern Lebanon and free Lebanese held in a prison run by pro-Israeli militiamen there.
Hallak, prominent in Lebanon’s 200-member Jewish community, was one of 10 Jews seized in Beirut in the last 11 months. The bodies of three have been found since December.
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