British Relief Official, Syrian Aide May Be Kidnaping Victims

SIDON, Lebanon —  A British official from a private relief organization and his Syrian aide have disappeared in Lebanon, and one official of their group said Friday that they had been kidnaped.

The purported abduction came near the end of a week that saw two Scandinavian employees of the United Nations and a West German engineer released in Lebanon.

Peter Coleridge, the 44-year-old Middle East coordinator for Oxfam, and Oxfam’s Lebanon representative, Omar Traboulsi, 31, a Syrian, were kidnaped Thursday evening, spokesman John Magrath said in Oxford, England.

Coleridge was on his first trip to Lebanon in three years.

‘No Eyewitnesses’

“We’ve had conflicting reports as to whether they are still being held or not,” Magrath said. But Nissrine Rawda, an official at Oxfam’s Beirut office, said there were “no eyewitnesses confirming the abduction.”

Sunni Muslim leftist leader Mustafa Saad, whose Nasserite militia controls Sidon, told reporters that the two Oxfam officials have been “detained for questioning” by an unidentified Palestinian group in Sidon’s Ein el Hilwa refugee camp.

“I expect their release within hours, God willing,” Saad said. “This is not an abduction. There is a security mishap in the camp.”

He said Coleridge had visited the Hittin area south of Ein el Hilwa in 1982, when it was devastated by Israel’s invading army.

Took Photos of Camp

“When he returned this time he took pictures of the area’s reconstruction and a group inside the camp seized him for questioning, fearing he might be taking espionage photographs,” Saad added.

Saad declined to name the group which he says is holding Coleridge and Traboulsi.

Police in this ancient city 25 miles south of Beirut confirmed that the two men had been missing since Thursday night but could not say for sure how they vanished.

“They may have been seized by gunmen of the Muslim Ulema grouping,” said a Sidon police spokesman who could not be identified in keeping with regulations. “We are acting on this assumption in our investigation.”

Ulema is a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim faction headed by Sheik Maher Hammoud and is influenced by the pro-Iranian Hezbollah, or Party of God.

Hammoud, however, disclaimed any involvement in the abduction.