Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ruled out a prisoner swap with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah before the end of next week.
| Damn. I was hoping he'd rule it out forever... |
The family of missing Israeli navigator Ron Arad, opposed to the release of one of his Hizbollah captors now held in Israel, was granted access by the state to a large part of the file. Arad's family had filed suit against Hizbollah's Mustafa Dirani and complained that the fate of the aviator, whose plane came down over Lebanon in 1986 and is widely believed dead, was being neglected. But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told public television on Thursday night that prisoners held in Europe over terrorism charges could be used as bargaining chips for any information on Arad.
| Those two sentences are constructed as though they have something to do with each other... |
"We have good bargaining chips, in which the Iranians are interested, and in which Hizbollah is very, very, very interested," Sharon said, referring to the Lebanese Shia guerrilla group. "They are in a European country, and this is part of the deal ... They carried out terror attacks." Palestinian and Arab media reported during the week that Israel could release up to 400 prisoners, including 185 Lebanese, Syrians and Jordanians.
| That wouild be remarkably stoopid. Bargaining with terrorists for hostages in the first place is distasteful. Exchanging them at the rate of 400 for one live one and information on one dead one doesn't make any sense at all. |
Germany, which has been the main mediator for the long-awaited prisoner swap, holds three Lebanese and one Iranian convicted in 1997 for the assassination five years earlier in a Berlin restaurant of Iranian Kurdish dissident Sadeq Sarafkindi. When contacted by French news agency AFP, the German foreign ministry refused to comment.
| "Was der Helle? WassÃŒp mit das?" |
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