French hostage finally home

The body of Michel Seurat returns home in a flagged-draped coffin. Picture / Reuters

The remains of a former French hostage in Lebanon came home to a hero's return, nearly 20 years to the day after his pro-Iranian Islamist captors announced his execution.

Tears mingled with memories of one of the most macabre episodes in recent French history as the tricolore-draped coffin of Michel Seurat arrived at Paris Orly Airport on board a Government plane, greeted by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy and the president of the Senate, Christian Poncelet. Earlier, the remains had been handed over to French officials at Beirut's police headquarters.

Seurat, 37, a researcher into Middle East culture, was abducted in May 1985, becoming one of 11 French nationals seized in Beirut by pro-Iranian Lebanese militia. Their case was a national issue, driven by appeals at the start of the nightly TV news for their plight not to be forgotten.

But Seurat's fate stirred particular grief. All the other hostages were eventually freed, but he alone never returned, leaving behind a widow, Syrian-born Marie Seurat, and two daughters, Alexandra, 3, and Laeticia, 9 months.

He had been missing for 10 months before his captors, the Islamic Jihad, declared on March 6, 1986 that he had been executed. But other hostages detained with Seurat said that he had become extremely sick and could only crawl, fuelling speculation that he had hepatitis or some other serious disease.

The sole picture released by the abductors was of an unidentifiable body wrapped from head to toe in a white winding sheet. It was only last October that Seurat's suspected remains were unearthed and then identified by DNA tests. A full post-mortem will now be conducted into how he died.

De Villepin, his voice breaking with emotion, paid tribute to "a great Frenchman ... a force in mind and spirit which is now returning to France".

Marie Seurat, who flew to Beirut to accompany the remains on the return flight, said the homecoming was a healing event for a family tortured by uncertainty for more than two decades. "I feel none of the dread that I had been anticipating for so long about this day - quite the opposite, I feel in peace, serene."

Laeticia referred movingly to a strange childhood in which her father was an abstract figure, present yet also absent: "I miss this man whom I don't know," she said, her voice knotted.

In 1991, Marie Seurat wrote a memoir about her experiences, describing the kafkaesque meetings with French officials and Lebanese Muslim leaders to lobby for their support. She was able to meet him once in captivity, a boon given to no other hostage.

She brought him books and letters, and, as a fluent Arabist who had spent 15 years in the region and sympathetic scholar of Islam, Seurat seemed confident that his captors would let him out to pursue his research.

Press reports and sources within the intelligence community say that the French secret service, the DGSE, secretly paid huge cash ransoms to intermediaries in Iran to have the captives freed in 1987 and 1988.

But coinciding with the hostage crisis was a wave of bomb attacks in Paris that killed 13 people and was linked to the Iranian Embassy. Speculation remains that Tehran approved the hostage-taking in the hope of gaining concessions from France, which had sided with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. When this tactic initially failed, Iran stepped up the pressure with the bombings, causing President Jacques Chirac, then Premier, to allegedly fork over the ransom and crack down on anti-Iranian activity in France. Chirac has denied that he made any deal.