On the fifth anniversary of American hostage Terry Anderson's capture, the 4-year-old daughter he has never seen said in a videotaped message Friday, "I love you, Daddy. Come home, please come home."
Madeline Bassil, Anderson's wife, wrote a letter to her husband that was published Friday in the independent An-Nahar newspaper and wondered if he will see the videotape of their daughter.The messages to Anderson came one day after the captors of three kidnapped American professors threatened to kill them unless the United States meets their demands. The kidnappers also vowed to attack all airports and airlines involved in transporting Soviet Jews to Israel.
The captors' threat coincided with the fifth anniversary in captivity of Anderson and came amid reports of behind-the-scenes negotiations to free some of the 18 Western hostages believed held by pro-Iranian fundamentalist groups in Lebanon. Eight of the hostages are Americans.
Bassil said in the letter to her husband, the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon: "I am always wondering if you have ever been able to read the letters sent to you . . . or even if they were read to you to let you know how much we love you and how difficult life is without you."
She added that a videotape of their 4-year-old daughter, Salome, would be shown on television in Lebanon Friday night.
"Will you be able to see it, to see her pretending she is talking to you?" Bassil wrote. Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press, has never met his daughter.
In the videotape, made available by the AP in Beirut, Salome was shown ballet dancing and saying, "I love you, Daddy. Come home, please come home."
There was no immediate indication of whether Anderson would see either the videotaped message or the letter.
In Paris, former French hostages in Lebanon Jean-Paul Kauffmann and Roger Auque chained themselves up in front of the Iranian Embassy Friday to dramatize Anderson's plight.
Kauffmann and Auque also blindfolded themselves in the protest outside the mission in the smart 16th district of Paris and declared: "We have chosen this moment to let people know how Terry Anderson is living at this moment.
"He is in chains. He has a blindfold on his eyes. He has to keep silent.
"This is how we were. This is how he is today," they said.
The professors' captors, the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, expressed outrage Thursday over the increased migration of Soviet Jews to Israel but did not spell out its demands in a statement given to An-Nahar.
The group had demanded that Israel release some 400 Palestinians jailed in Israel on charges of agitating the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Israel had rejected the proposed deal and said it would not deal with terrorists.
The kidnappers expressed anger at the immigration of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel and threatened to attack all airports and airlines involved in facilitating their transport.
"We will start to undertake adequate measures to prevent the arrival of the Soviets," the group said. "All airports, airlines and airplanes will become our direct targets. This is an ultimatum and a threat at present addressed to everyone to back off from future involvement (in Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel)."
Attached to the handwritten, two-page Arabic statement delivered to the independent newspaper was a photograph of hostage Alann Steen, 51, who appeared to have lost weight during his captivity.
The bearded Steen, wearing a light yellow T-shirt, appeared defeated. He stood in front of a wall in a dimly lighted room.
The group also holds Jesse Turner, 41, and Robert Polhill, 54.
All three Americans were professors who were snatched from the campus of the American-affiliated Beirut University College by men disguised as police on Jan. 24, 1987.
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Carter has hopes for captives' release
Former President Jimmy Carter pn Friday said chances seem better than ever for the release of foreign hostages in Lebanon and that President Hafez Assad repeated vows to help win their freedom. Carter made the comments to a news conference in the Syrian capital Damascus on the fifth anniversary of the kidnapping in west Beriut of American reporter Terry Anderson, the longest held of the 16 Westerners missing in Lebanon. "My own conviction is that more opportunities exist now for his release than ever before," Carter said. He spoke shortly before he left Syria for Jordan, the third leg of a tour that carried him earlier to Egypt and will later take him to Israel. Carter said he did not know if there were any secret U.S. dealings on the matter, but he noted "there are statements being made from Tehran that to me are encouraging. I think now there's a growing desire on the part of the Iranian government and the U.S. government to work out the problems between us. There's no doubt that Iran has influence