PROFILE: Samir Kuntar, "hero" at home, "ruthless murderer" in Israel

Jul 16, 2008, 2:07 GMT

Tel Aviv/Beirut - Samir Kunter was going on 17 years of age in April 1979 when he led a raid into northern Israel from Lebanon.

Now, over 29 years later, he is the highest-profile Lebanese prisoner due to be freed under the exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah, a 'hero' at home, and a 'ruthless murderer' in Israel.

The raid by the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) of Palestinian militant leader Abu Abbas was to protest the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signed the previous month.

Kuntar and three other members of the group infiltrated Israel in a rubber boat. They shot dead an Israeli policemen who had spotted them and then stormed into a residential building in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, where they took hostage an Israeli and his four-year-old daughter, whom they took back to the beach.

They group was intercepted by Israeli police and soldiers and in the ensuing shootout two of Kuntar's squad and a second Israeli policeman were killed.

According to a policeman who was present and witnessed the events, Kuntar shot the Israeli hostage and drowned him in the sea to ensure his death. He also repeatedly smashed the head of the struggling four-year-old girl with his rifle butt, until she was dead too, the witness said.

The family's mother, hiding out in an overhead crawl space in her apartment, had earlier inadvertantly suffocated to death her other, two-year-old, daughter, covering her mouth with her hand to keep her from screaming as the hostage-takers were searching the house.

Kuntar was captured and sentenced by an Israeli court to five life terms and another 47 in years in prison - one term for each death he was held accountable for and the extra years for injuries caused.

In jail, he married an Arab-Israeli woman active on behalf of an organization lobbying for the well-being of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons and also obtained a degree in sociology at a Tel Aviv college, studying from his prison cell. He also held a number of hunger strikes in jail.

Now about to turn 46, Kuntar, a Druze from the Mount Lebanon village of Abey overlooking Beirut, had already as a child expressed enthusiasm for the 'Arab cause' and once even wrote under his picture 'Samir Kuntar - the martyr,' some of his friends in the village say.

Just under a year before his 1979 raid, dubbed 'the Nasser operation' by the PLF, Kuntar had attempted to carry out another attack against Israel from Jordan, but was captured by the Jordanians and jailed for 11 months.

In one of his letters to his family he famously wrote 'If I were to spend another 20 years in prison, I will not write an apology letter for the Nasser operation, because the struggle continues.

'I had the honour of defending my nation in 1979 and the only regret I have is not being there to fight for my country during the ruthless Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.'

A former cellmate told an Israeli newspaper earlier this month that Kuntar's 'sincere belief in armed struggle against Israel' had motivated his attack and that he never expressed remorse, but insisted on a different version of events, maintaining that his goal had been to take hostages and not to kill anyone.