British experts search for slain journalist in Lebanon

RASHAYA, Lebanon (AFP) – British experts are searching for the body of journalist Alec Collett, who was kidnapped and killed 25 years ago at the height of Lebanon's civil war, a security source said on Monday.

"A nine-member team headed by Lieutenant Colonel Giles Taylor is working to recover the body of British journalist Alec Collett in the eastern Bekaa valley," the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"The team is made of specialists with military and intelligence backgrounds. Their mission is expected to take a week," the source said, adding the search was being conducted outside the eastern town of Aita al-Fakhar amid tight security.

The British diplomatic mission in Beirut confirmed the search was under way.

"The British embassy in cooperation with the United Nations is involved in a humanitarian mission to recover and return the remains of a British national who disappeared in Lebanon in 1985 while working for the United Nations," a spokesman told AFP, but refused to give further details.

An AFP correspondent said journalists were not allowed near the site in eastern Bekaa, which was a stronghold for armed Palestinian groups at the onset of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

Collett went missing in 1985 and was reported to have been killed a year later.

Sixty-four years old at the time, he was on assignment in refugee camps for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) near the Beirut airport when taken hostage.

The Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO), an offshoot of the Palestinian Fatah Movement, claimed responsibility for the abduction and killing, said to be in response to US air raids on Libya, a funder of the ANO.

In April 2009, a videotape showed the hanging of a hooded man said to be Collett, but the victim was never officially identified.