The Herald Sun · Durham, North Carolina · 27 December 1979

CP-1979-002

Palestinian Said Tortured In Israel

Associated Press, Tyre, Lebanon

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Transcribed from the clipping

“TYRE, Lebanon (AP) — A PLO spokesman said a Palestinian guerrilla whose body was returned here Wednesday was tortured to death in an Israeli prison. Israel denied the charge. The Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman, known by the codename Mustafa, said the guerrilla fighter died Dec. 21 after being imprisoned in Beersheba, Israel for nine years.

He said an autopsy would be performed on the body of Yasser Faour. An Israeli police spokesman said in Tel Aviv that pathological tests were being conducted to determine how Faour died, but said his death was ‘not the result of violence.’

Faour was arrested in 1970 in the village of Tershiha on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River as he was returning from a guerrilla operation, PLO officials said. Faour’s father died mysteriously while visiting the imprisoned guerrilla in Beersheba last year, Mustafa said.

The dead guerrilla’s body was handed over to Red Cross officials who transported it across the Israel-Lebanon border a day after artillery exchanges in the area. Mustafa, who claimed that five guerrillas have died in Israeli prisons this year, said it was the first time Israel delivered a dead guerrilla across the Lebanese border.

Dead guerrillas’ bodies are ususally returned via of Jordan, although prisoner exchanges have been conducted on the Israel-Lebanon frontier. The Red Cross official in charge of southern Lebanon, Marc Dryer, said the transfer was approved by the Israelis and their rightist Lebanese Christian allies.

The rightists control a 6-mile-deep border strip of Lebanon and are enemies of the Palestinians. ‘We had the cooperation of all sides,’ he said.”

Context added by this archive

The paper prints the accusation, the denial, and the detail that the man’s father had died while visiting him in the same prison. “Ususally” is the paper’s spelling.

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