The retired Lebanese security guard disappeared last December after going to meet a potential land buyer.
Lebanese officials and the family of retired Secretary General Captain Ahmed Shukr believe he was kidnapped and extradited to Israel as part of an intelligence operation to obtain information about the fate of an Israeli airman who went missing in Lebanon 40 years ago.
The family believes Shukr was kidnapped because he may be linked to the disappearance of Israeli navigator Ron Arad. The family said Shukr had never joined an armed group and played no role in Arad’s disappearance.
Nearly three months after Shukr disappeared, and after the United States and Israel attacked Iran and sparked war in the Middle East, Israel conducted a deadly commando operation in Nabichit, Lebanon, this weekend to search for Arad’s remains.
Residents said the commando team began digging the Shukr family gravesite in Nabi Chit before being confronted by Hezbollah militants and armed civilians. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said 41 people were killed and dozens injured in violent clashes and airstrikes. No Israeli casualties were reported.
It was not immediately clear whether Israel’s operation was the result of information obtained from Shukr.
The Israeli military acknowledged the operation was aimed at finding evidence about Arad’s fate and said his remains had not been found. The military refused to answer questions about whether Israel had captured Shukr.
Nonetheless, the incident appears to be consistent with a decades-long pattern of Israeli covert operations and commandos deep inside Lebanon to capture or kill people involved in anti-Israel activities.
Israel has claimed responsibility for such operations in some cases, including in November 2024 when it claimed the captain kidnapped in northern Lebanon was a senior Hezbollah operative.
In other cases, such as the mysterious kidnapping and killing of a Hezbollah-linked Lebanese currency exchange operator in April 2024, Israel has remained silent, but Lebanese officials have said there is evidence of Israeli involvement.
Decades of Search
Israel has been trying to find out what happened to Arad since he parachuted from a fighter jet during an attack on suspected Palestinian militants outside the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon in 1986.
A Shiite Islamic force called the Believers’ Resistance occupied Arad after it landed.
In 1994, Israeli commandos landed by helicopter deep in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, captured Mustafa Dirani, the leader of the Christian resistance, and took him to Israel.
Dirani was released in a prisoner exchange ten years later. He said in a 2000 interview with the Israeli daily Marib that Arad disappeared in 1988 when his guards left him to check on relatives living near the site of a major battle between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli army then occupying parts of Lebanon.
But the Associated Press reported in 2000 that Dirani told an Israeli court that Arad was taken away by Iranian soldiers. Israeli judicial officials said Dirani gave varying accounts of events that occurred while in captivity.
After lengthy indirect negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group sent a report on Arad through a mediator in 2008, suggesting that Arad likely died trying to reach Israel after his escape.
Shuker connection
Shukr’s relatives said they became acquainted with a Lebanese citizen named Ali Morad in the months before his disappearance, contacted him through social media and rented an apartment the retired officer owned in south Beirut.
Shukr’s wife, Salwa Hazimeh, said Morad called her husband in mid-December and told him that a business owner was interested in purchasing land for sale in the city of Zahle and that he wanted to see her at 5:30 p.m.
“I stood next to him and told him he couldn’t see the land late in the afternoon, but he (Morad) insisted,” she said. Shukr drove to Zahle the next day, Dec. 17, and security footage showed him getting out of his car and getting into another car, Hajime said.
“Since then we know nothing about him,” Hazimeh said.
Shukr’s family says he suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems and requires constant care and medication.
Family members said Shukr’s mobile phone was last activated around 7am on December 18 in the eastern town of Ghazzeh. They believe Shukr was taken to Israel by land from southern Lebanon.
“This seems like an incredible production,” said Adam Coogle, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch. “It’s essentially kidnapping someone and then transporting them across the border without due process.”
Beirut judicial authorities said four people, including Morad, a Lebanese-French citizen, a Syrian-Swedish citizen, and a Lebanese woman who rented a villa overlooking Zaleh, were charged with crimes in this case. Judicial authorities said that an SUV was purchased for $22,000 to kidnap Shukr, and the woman paid $42,000 in one-year rent for a villa.
Morad’s lawyer, Samaher Bourhan, said her client alleges he was the victim of a kidnapping that ultimately led him to believe he was working for a foreign company. She said the company asked him to purchase the vehicle and register it in his name. It was claimed that this was because it had no legal presence in Lebanon.
“He said he handed himself over because he knew nothing about surgery,” Bourhan said.
Shukr’s wife and his brother Abdul-Salam Shukr told the AP that the retired officer had no information about Arad’s fate.
But another family member of Shukr, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said Shukr’s brother Hassan Shukr was a Hezbollah member and knew where Arad was being held.
The family said Arad was held in a secret room at the home of a relative of Hassan Shukr, a member of the Dirani believer resistance group in Nabi Chit.
Judicial authorities said Arad was held captive by the Shukr family in Nabi Chit and that doctors were brought in to treat him because he was ill at some point, according to a Lebanese army report from the 1980s.
The family said Hasan Shukr was killed in the Battle of Maydoun on May 5, 1988. When the fighters returned to Nabichit from battle that day, the family said, Arad found the metal door of the room open and the prisoner missing.
The Shukr family claimed that Ahmed Shukr was not involved in detaining Arad and had no further information about the case.
scene
AP staff visited the two-story home that law enforcement officials and Shukr’s family say was used by agents as a base to carry out the kidnapping. The main metal gate was sealed by Lebanese authorities, but local residents said they had not seen any suspicious activity inside the house, known as ‘Wood Villa’.
A resident of a nearby building said Lebanese security agents collected evidence from the house in mid-December.
A local store owner said security guards took his security camera disc. He said the villa had previously been rented out by individuals or groups to host parties.
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