The body of Alec Collett, kidnapped in 1985 but not heard from since 1986, has been found in eastern Lebanon, the UN announced 23 November, Monday. Collett, age 63 at the time, was working for UNWRA (Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). He was the first person to be kidnapped in what became a string of abductions in the 1980s in Lebanon. He was traveling in a car near the airport in Beirut, stopped by a group that called itself the Revolutionary Organization of Muslim Socialists. His Austrian driver was also taken, but later released. Collett had worked for several years as a journalist, in Prague, Czechoslovakia and later in New York, especially at the UN. An reported eyewitness account of his hanging, attributed to ruthless Palestinian leader Abu Nidal, was published in 2005, at which point Collett’s American wife, Elaine, also a UN worker, renewed calls to find the body in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

Links to other sites: CNN, United Nations press release, Times (May 2005)

Jaycee Duggard was 11 years old when she was snatched off the street by two people in a car near her home in South Lake Tahoe in full view of her step-father in 1991. She had been kept in backyard sheds at the house of her kidnappers for 18 years and is the mother of two girls, 15 and 11, fathered by Philipp Garrido, a convicted and listed sex-offender, who kidnapped her with his wife. The man was on the UC Berkeley campus near San Francisco with the two young girls 25 August when his behavioiur with the two girls aroused suspicion. Police made a background check and took him into custody. Duggard, now 29, has been reunited with her mother. BBC, CNN