Hizballah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged Wednesday his group had brokered a prisoner swap with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The deal involves the remains of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Hizballah fighters abducted the Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid in July 2006, an event that led to the July War between the military wing of Lebanese Hizballah and the Israeli military.
Nasrallah Wednesday said the speculation that the two Israeli soldiers were dead, however, was “not based on anything tangible.”
The Lebanese prisoners involved in the exchange are all still living. The most controversial of them is Samir Kantar who is serving consecutive life terms for killing an Israeli policemen, a man and his 4-year-old daughter in a 1979 northern Israeli attack.
It is alleged Kantar crushed the girls skull, sparking condemnation the deal marked a new low for Israeli prisoner negotiations.
Nasrallah said he would update Israeli officials on information regarding Israeli air force officer Ron Arad. Shiite rebels captured Arad in 1986 when his plane was shot down over Lebanese territory. It is uncertain if Arad is alive or dead, however.
Meanwhile, the British Home Office Wednesday took measures to ban the military wing of the Shiite group over claims it had trained fighters in southern Iraq. Iraqi lawmakers blame Hizballah for stoking sectarian violence in the region and Wednesday, a spokesmen for radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr suggested he would form an elite fighting force comprised of these specially-trained militants.
The British ban seemingly pertains only to the military wing of Hizballah and does not concern the political branches of the group.