Israelis Say Palestinian Help Resolved MIA Case From ’89

JERUSALEM —  On a spring evening seven years ago, Israeli soldier Ilan Saadon was hitchhiking home from his base and accepted a ride from two taciturn men whose beards and skullcaps made them look like yeshiva students.

That was the last anyone who knew him ever saw of Saadon.

Two days later, officials in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip found a car stained with blood and littered with spent rifle shells. They concluded that the 19-year-old corporal had been executed by disguised members of the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Over the years, Saadon’s large family continued to nurse the slender hope that he might still be alive; family members even visited an imprisoned Hamas sheik to plead for information. Military officials also never gave up the search, abiding by an Israeli army motto: “Never leave a comrade in the field.”

The uncertainty ended Tuesday, however, with news that searchers, aided by information obtained by Palestinian police, had located “with a high degree of certainty” Saadon’s remains, buried in dunes south of Tel Aviv. Bones, which still must be subjected to DNA testing, and a pair of shorts believed to have belonged to Saadon were found beneath a new coastal road.

“It is over, over,” said Saadon’s mother, Jilbert, interviewed by Israel Radio. “I was the mother of 10. Now I have nine.”

Radio reporter Yoni Ben Menaham, known for his intelligence service contacts, said the remains were found through the efforts of a Palestinian security officer who traveled to several Middle East nations to track one of the killers, now in Sudan and presumably out of reach of both Israeli and Palestinian justice.

Officials here said the case illustrates the growing cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in security and intelligence matters--efforts that are continuing despite the political tensions that have risen since the election in late May of a hard-line Israeli government.

Yaacov Perry, who coordinates the search for the few Israeli service personnel listed as missing in action, praised the Palestinians for their help. He denied that they had insisted on any deal for the information, such as the long-discussed release of imprisoned Sheik Ahmed Yassin, 61, a Hamas spiritual leader.

“This was humanitarian, direct assistance in an unfortunate and tragic affair which I hope has come to an end,” said Perry, a former head of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet.

The remains believed to be Saadon’s were found nine days after a German-brokered swap in which Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group turned over the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon in the 1980s in exchange for the bodies of more than 100 slain Hezbollah guerrillas.

Army friend Yoram Amrusi was hitchhiking with Saadon on May 3, 1989. “A car pulled up,” he recalled Tuesday, but he couldn’t make out the faces of its occupants in the dusk. “They looked like yeshiva students. They said ‘To Ashkelon,’ and didn’t say anything else.”

Amrusi did not board because he wanted to take a route that would bring him closer to his own home. “I believe in fate,” he said of his narrow escape.

Jilbert Saadon said that Ilan, her youngest child, recently came to her in a dream. He stared at her before disappearing.

“You can laugh and be happy,” she said, “but there is always a bullet in your heart.”