Terry Anderson, the American journalist who had been the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was lastly launched in 1991 by Islamic militants after greater than six years in captivity, has died at his house in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., within the Hudson Valley. He was 76.
The trigger was apparently problems of current coronary heart surgical procedure, stated his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
Mr. Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for The Related Press, had simply dropped his tennis associate, an A.P. photographer, at his house after an early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when males armed with pistols yanked open his automotive door and shoved him right into a Mercedes-Benz. The identical automotive had tried to chop him off the day earlier than as he returned to work from lunch at his seaside residence.
The abductors, recognized as Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Group in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and stored him chained in some 20 hideaways for two,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
The militants had hoped to strain the Reagan administration to secretly facilitate the unlawful gross sales of weapons to Iran — an embarrassing scheme that grew to become often known as the Iran-Contra Affair as a result of the administration had deliberate to make use of proceeds from the arms gross sales to secretly subsidize the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Mr. Anderson was the final of 18 Western hostages launched by the abductors. After his launch, he married his fiancé, who had been pregnant when he was kidnapped, and, for the primary time, met his 6-year-old daughter.
Whereas he had not been tortured throughout his captivity, he stated, he was crushed and chained. He spent a 12 months or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he stated.
“There is nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he stated after the ordeal. “I try praying, every day, sometimes for hours. But there’s nothing there, just a blankness. I’m talking to myself, not God.”
“I had problems,” he continued, “and it took me a long time to begin to cope with them. People ask me, ‘Did you get over them?’ I don’t know! Ask my ex-wife — ask my third ex-wife. I don’t know; I am who I am.”
Mr. Anderson had been a Marine Corps fight journalist in Vietnam for 5 years earlier than becoming a member of The A.P. He had labored in Beirut for 2 and a half years earlier than he was seized by the militants.
A full obituary will comply with.
