ZAHLE, Lebanon — A retired Lebanese security officer vanished in December after going to meet a possible buyer for a plot of land.
Lebanese officials and the family of retired General Security Directorate Capt. Ahmed Shukr believe he was abducted and spirited away to Israel in an intelligence operation aimed at getting information on the fate of an Israeli airman who disappeared in Lebanon four decades ago.
The family believes Shukr was taken because of his brother’s possible links to the disappearance of Israeli navigator Ron Arad. The family says Shukr was never part of a militant group and played no role in Arad’s disappearance.
Nearly three months after Shukr disappeared – and after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, triggering a war in the Middle East – Israel carried out a deadly commando operation in Nabi Chit, Lebanon, this weekend in search of Arad’s remains.
Residents said the commando team began digging in the Shukr family cemetery in Nabi Chit before being confronted by fighters from the Hezbollah militant group and armed civilians. Intense clashes and airstrikes left 41 people dead and dozens wounded, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. No Israeli casualties were reported.
It was not immediately clear if the Israeli operation came as a result of information extracted from Shukr.
The Israeli military acknowledged the operation aimed to find evidence of Arad’s fate, and said his remains were not found. The military declined to comment when asked whether Israel had taken Shukr.
Still, the incident appears to fits a decades-long pattern of Israeli covert actions and commando operations deep inside Lebanon to capture or kill people it says were involved in anti-Israel activities.
Israel has in some cases claimed responsibility for such operations, including the case of a sea captain taken from northern Lebanon in November 2024 whom Israel claimed was a senior Hezbollah operative.
In others, such as the mysterious abduction and killing of a Hezbollah-linked Lebanese currency exchanger in April 2024, Israel has remained silent, but Lebanese officials have said they have evidence of its involvement.
Israel has searched for lost airman for decades
For decades, Israel has been trying to find out what happened to Arad, who parachuted from his fighter jet while attacking suspected Palestinian militants in 1986 on the edge of the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon.
A Shiite Muslim faction called the Believers’ Resistance captured Arad after he landed.
In 1994, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos landed deep in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, where they seized the leader of the Believers’ Resistance, Mustafa Dirani, and took him to Israel.
Dirani was released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange. He told the Israeli daily Maariv in an interview in 2000 that Arad disappeared in 1988 when his guards left him to check on relatives living near the site of a major battle in 1988 between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli troops, who occupied parts of Lebanon at the time.
But The Associated Press reported in 2000 that Dirani told an Israeli court that Arad was taken away by Iranian soldiers. An Israeli judicial official said Dirani gave different accounts of events while in captivity.
After lengthy indirect negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group sent a report about Arad through mediators in 2008, suggesting he most likely died trying to reach Israel after escaping.
The connection with Shukr
Relatives of Shukr told AP that months before he went missing, he got to know a Lebanese citizen called Ali Morad who contacted him through social media and rented an apartment the retired officer owned south of Beirut.
Shukr’s wife, Salwa Hazimeh, said Morad called her husband in mid-December and told him a business owner was interested in buying a plot of land he wanted to sell in the city of Zahle and would like to see it at 5:30 p.m.
“I was standing by him as he spoke and told him that we cannot see the plot of land later in the afternoon but he (Morad) insisted,” she said. Shukr drove the next day, Dec. 17, to Zahle, where security footage showed him getting out of his own car and entering another, Hazimeh said.
“Since then we know nothing about him,” Hazimeh said.
Shukr’s family says he has diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems, and needs constant care and medication.
The family members said Shukr’s phone was last active in the eastern village of Ghazzeh around 7 a.m. on Dec. 18. They believe he was taken by land into Israel from southern Lebanon.
“It looks like an extraordinary rendition,” said Adam Coogle, deputy director with the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “That is effectively kidnapping someone, then transporting them across borders without any due process.”
Judicial officials in Beirut said the judiciary has charged four people with crimes in the case, including Morad, as well as a Lebanese-French citizen, a Syrian-Swedish citizen and a Lebanese woman who rented a villa overlooking Zahle. The judicial officials said an SUV was bought for $22,000 for Shukr’s kidnapping and that the woman paid $42,000 for a year’s rent of the villa.
Morad’s lawyer, Samaher Bourhan, said her client maintains he was a victim who believed he was working for a foreign company and ended up being used in the kidnapping. She said the company asked him to buy the vehicle and register it under his own name, claiming it was because they had no legal presence in Lebanon.
“He said that he handed himself over because he had no idea about the operation,” Bourhan said.
Shukr’s wife and his brother, Abdul-Salam Shukr, told the AP that the retired officer has no information about Arad’s fate.
But another member of Shukr’s family, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said Shukr’s brother, Hassan Shukr was a member of Hezbollah and knew where Arad had been held.
The family member said Arad had been held in a locked room at the home of Hassan Shukr’s in-laws, who were members of Dirani’s Believers’ Resistance in Nabi Chit.
The judicial officials confirmed that a Lebanese army report in the 1980s said Arad was held by the Shukr family in Nabi Chit and that he was ill at some point and they brought doctors to treat him.
The family member said Hassan Shukr was killed in the Meidoun battle on May 5, 1988. On that day, when fighters returned from battle to Nabi Chit, they found the metal door of the room where Arad was kept open and the captive gone, the family member said.
The Shukr family member insisted that Ahmed Shukr was not involved in holding Arad and does not have any additional information about the case.
The scene of the mystery
An AP crew visited the two-story house that judicial officials and Shukr’s family said was used as the base by the operatives to carry out the kidnapping. The main metal gate was sealed by Lebanese authorities while locals said they did not see any suspicious movements inside the house, known as “Wood Villa.”
A resident living in a nearby building said Lebanese security agents collected evidence from the house in mid December.
A local shop owner said security agents took the discs of his security cameras. He said that the villa had previously been rented by individuals or groups to hold parties.
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Associated Press writer Josef Federman contributed to this report from Jerusalem.
