Hizbullah leader says he believes Arad is dead

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
The leader of the Hizbullah guerrillas said Wednesday that he believed IAF avigator Ron Arad, who disappeared after his plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986, is dead. But Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, whose guerrillas fought Israeli forces for 18 years in southern Lebanon and has engaged in several previous prisoner exchanges with the Jewish state, said he did not base his conviction on facts but rather on calculations. "My deduction is two words: 'dead and lost,' " he said in an interview on the local New TV station.