Mansour 'Confident' Imam Sadr Still Alive

Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour on Monday said he was confident that missing Imam Moussa al-Sadr and his two companions were still alive, upon his return from a several-day visit to Libya, where the three were last seen.

“The Libyan leaders expressed their readiness to closely follow up on the case,” Mansour said in an interview with NBN television.

“We are confident that the three are still alive,” Mansour said.

He added that Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Rahim al-Kib “has instructed that the Sadr case be granted maximum attention.”

Mansour noted that “Libyan investigators might visit Lebanon to follow up the case.”

The minister, heading a Lebanese delegation, arrived on Wednesday in Tripoli to discuss the case of Sadr in the first visit to Libya by a Lebanese diplomat in more than 30 years.

Sadr, a charismatic and revered Shiite spiritual leader, had been officially invited to Libya in 1978 during the rule of Moammar Gadhafi along with an aide and a journalist.

But the three men have not been heard of since and Tripoli had always maintained that the cleric had left Libya for Italy.

Since the mysterious disappearance of Sadr, ties between Libya and Lebanon have been strained.

"The shadow of this case has hung over bilateral relations between Lebanon and Libya for more than 33 years," said Mansour on Wednesday.

"We want to turn this black page and establish fraternal and constructive bilateral relations and that is why it is of great importance that we reveal the truth" about the case, he added.

Also on Wednesday, Libya’s National Transitional Council member Fathi Baja said some clues of the case could possibly be found in files obtained by the new rulers which belonged to the intelligence, foreign affairs and police authorities of the ousted Gadhafi regime.

Baja also dismissed recent reports that Sadr had died of natural causes in a prison cell in 1998.

A Gadhafi aide, Ahmed Ramadan, had previously said on television that Sadr was "liquidated" after he met the former strongman in Tripoli in 1978.

Sadr's trip to Libya was aimed at negotiating an end to Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

The Iranian-born cleric arrived in Tripoli on August 25, 1978, with two companions Sheikh Mohammed Yacoub and journalist Abbas Badreddine. They were seen for the last time on August 31, 1978.

The Gadhafi regime was ousted late last year following an eight-month armed uprising.