Terry Anderson spent a fifth birthday as a hostage Friday, a grim milestone in his captivity.
His relatives and friends marked the event with a flood of messages. Radio reports said Lebanon's three television stations would screen a birthday message from his 4-year-old daughter, Sulome.The daily newspapers An-Nahar and As-Safir and the French-language L'Orient-Le Jour published English texts of letters to Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent of The Associated Press who was abducted March 16, 1985.
His sister, Peggy Say, wrote, "In honor of your birthday on Friday, we will be in Washington with other hostage families to mark another sad year in which you have been denied your freedom."
The Journalists' Committee to Free Terry Anderson, made up of colleagues from all over the United States, wrote: "Please believe that not a day passes when we do not think of you and pray for you."
The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan said it was sending a 33-foot birthday scroll to Anderson signed by 59 journalists and former colleagues in Tokyo.
Anderson was a member of the club during a working assignment in Japan 1979-1981. Gunmen seized the 42-year-old Anderson in Moslem west Beirut after a game of tennis that had been a brief respite from his reporting on Lebanon's civil war.