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)

The ICRC (International Red Cross), the UN and several governments including Switzerland expressed outrage after Israel hit a hospital in Gaza and UN shelters and offices, including the head office of Unrwa, the main relief organization. According to the BBC, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologized for the strike to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, “but [he] said Palestinian fighters had been firing from the UN site.”