Families of Lebanon’s missing call for help to locate them

The Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon yesterday urged anyone with information about their loved ones who went missing during Lebanon’s civil war (1975- 1990) to come forward, the Anadolu Agency reported.

The committee made the appeal as relatives and family members of missing persons gathered outside the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

“We were pleased with the so-called peace that was announced in 1990, but it did not bring back our loved ones,” said Widad Hilwani, committee head.

“We are waiting for those who know the truth, to disclose it,” she added.

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According to the Lebanese police records issued in 1991, as many as 17,000 persons were forcibly disappeared during the civil war.

Mahmoud Khaled, an Egyptian citizen whose brother went missing in 1986, said: “I appealed to President [Abdel] Fattah Al-Sisi before he became president, and now I wrote a sign hoping the Egyptian ambassador to Lebanon would contact the foreign ministry telling it that an Egyptian man has not seen his brother for 40 years.”

“In 1986, my brother went to Syria and stayed at a motel. Later we were informed that he was kidnapped by the Syrian intelligence,” Khaled told the Anadolu Agency.

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In January 2000 a commission of inquiry was established to investigate the fate of all missing persons and concluded that as many as 2,046 persons went missing during the war.

After the Syrian army withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, the Lebanese authorities handed over to Damascus a list of 615 people believed to be held in Syrian prisons, but the Syrian regime denied that it was detaining them.