By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

It is now 39 years since the Phalangist militia of Lebanon conspired with Mossad to kidnap four Iranians – three diplomats and a journalist – along with their Lebanese driver, as a 4th of July gift for the US.
The Lebanese civil has long ended (1990) and the principal abductor of the Iranians, that is, the notorious Elie Hobeika long dead (2002), yet these hostages continue to languish in a Zionist dungeon, while the self-styled advocates of human rights in the West keep an eerie silence.
It should be recalled that Hobeika, who was the liaison officer to Mossad following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and who would later that year in September 1982 assist Ariel Sharon the Butcher of Sabra & Shatilla in massacring 5,000 Palestinian elderly men, women, and children at the refugee camp, had handed the Iranian hostages and their Lebanese driver to the illegal Zionist entity.
Since then there is no news whether Charge d’Affaires Seyyed Mohsen Musavi, Ahmad Motavasellian, Mohammad Taqi Rastegar Moqaddam, and Kazem Akhawan, are alive or were martyred by their tormentors.
A decade ago there were reports citing Palestinian prisoners released from Zionist dungeons of having seen the four Iranian hostages, who bore traces of torture.
The UN, despite Iran’s earnest efforts to trace its citizens has shrugged any responsibility, because it does not want to annoy the US or cause inconvenience to Israel.
This means the US is also a party to the fate and sufferings of the Iranian diplomats who are without doubt the world’s longest held hostages.
The most concrete proof of American involvement is the CIA’s hiring of Hobeika to assassinate Lebanon’s senior-most religious leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Hussein Fadhlollah – a plot that failed in March 1985 and led to the martyrdom of several unsuspecting Shi’a Muslims in Beirut.
Whatever the case, the Islamic Republic holds the UN and other human rights bodies, as well as the US and the Zionist regime, responsible for this crime, and will continue to lobby for details on their fate.
Whether or not the abductees return home one day, the Zionist regime and its master, the US, will indeed be made to pay a heavy price for their crimes against humanity.