Former hostage McCarthy goes back to Beirut

Former hostage McCarthy goes back to Beirut
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 11/01/2004)

Sunday Telegraph

John McCarthy, the television journalist and author, is to return to Beirut this week for the first time since he was freed after being held hostage there for more than five years.




John McCarthy

McCarthy will spend two weeks in Lebanon as part of his research for a documentary that he hopes will provide an insight into Shia Muslims, the largest group in Iraq.

It was a militant Iranian-backed Shia group that held McCarthy hostage - along with other westerners including Terry Waite and Brian Keenan - after he was kidnapped on his first foreign assignment as a television news producer in April 1986.

He was eventually released in August 1991 after being held in chains in 13 locations around Beirut.

In an interview with the Telegraph yesterday, McCarthy spoke of his mixed feelings about flying to Lebanon this Tuesday. "For a long time I had no interest in going back. I have never felt I needed to go back to lay any ghosts to rest," he said.

"As the years went by and the civil war came to an end and the country settled down, I still felt no great pull to go back to confront my past. But now I'm excited to be going back to carry out a journalistic project that really interests me."

McCarthy 47, was married four years ago to Anna Ottewill, a photographer. They have homes in Suffolk and London. He has written or co-written four books since he was freed, including Some Other Rainbow with Jill Morrell, his former girlfriend, about his time in captivity, and Between Extremes with Brian Keenan, his fellow hostage.

McCarthy has few feelings of anger towards his captors and no desire for revenge. His deepest regret is that the kidnappers, believed to have been linked to the Hizbollah group, were not willing to get a message to his elderly, sick mother Sheila that her son was alive and well. She died of cancer in 1989 while he was in captivity.

McCarthy does not intend to try to make contact with his former captors and does not know the precise locations where he was held. "I want to see how Lebanon has moved on and how the Shia population has moved on," he said.

He believes that Lebanon is now a safe place, and he does not fear that he will be in any danger upon his return.

McCarthy also plans to visit Iran and Iraq to research his programme, due to be shown on ITV in April. "The whole thing was inspired by the fact that, after the Iraq war, there is little understanding in the West of the Shia people."