BEIRUT, Lebanon (UPI): Captors of 15 foreign hostages again linked their captives fate to the controversial book.
“The Satanic Verses” by refusing to respond to efforts to free them, a caller said as protesters burned an effigy of the novel’s author.
More than 5,000 supporters of the pro-Iranian group Hezbollah marched Sunday in the mainly Shiite Moslem southern suburbs of Beirut chanting “death to the apostate (Salman) Rushdie,” the British author who wrote the book considered blasphemous by Moslems:
We will not rest until we kill Rushdie and send him to hell,” shouted the protesters, responding to a death order against the Indian born author by Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran has since offered nearly $6 million to anyone who carries out the order.
The demonstrators, marching in the Syrian policed areas of Beirut, burned an effigy of Rushdie hanged from a wooden gallows.
A similar protest was made in the Shiite town of Baalbek, 52 miles east of Beirut, where demonstrators burned the U.S. British and Israeli flags.
All three nations are among those who have published or are planning to publish the book. India, Pakistan and other Moslem nations have banned the surrealist novel with a dream sequence implying the Prophet Mohammed may have written the Moslem Koran himself, rather than as God dictated it to him.
A telephone caller claiming to represent the captors of nine Americans and six foreigners Sunday linked the hostages fate to the controversial book.
The caller, who telephoned a Western news agency, said all pro Indian factions holding foreigners “jointly decided” not to respond to efforts to release any captive.
The Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Justice Organization agreed not to free any hostages,” the caller said, adding the kidnappers, “had related the hostages plight to the campaign against Islam through Rushdie’s book.”
The fate of the hostages was first linked to the Rushdie controversy on Thursday when the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine which holds three US. Professors, threatened to retaliate. The groups’ statement was accompanied by a photograph of the three captive men but did not say what the retaliation would be.
The caller on Sunday said, “The fate of the hostages will be decided only by (Ayatollah Ruhollah) Imam Khomeini.”
Analysts said the allegations coincided with a step-up campaign against Rushdie by Hezbollah or Party of God, the pro-Iranian organization believed to be the umbrella group for those holding the hostages and which staged Sunday’s protests.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 3, 1989
