Kidnapers to Put U.S. Marine on Trial; U.S. Calls Plan ‘Grotesque’

The pro-Iranian kidnapers of Lt. Col. William R. Higgins said Thursday that the U.S. Marine officer will be tried on charges of spying for the United States.

“This criminal will be turned over today to the tribunal of the oppressed to try him for the crimes he has committed,” a group calling itself the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth said in a typewritten statement delivered to the Reuters news agency office.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley said a “so-called trial” of Higgins “can bring only further discredit to the terrorists and their cause. The notion that the Organization for the Oppressed on Earth . . . has the right to try anyone is simply grotesque.”

Higgins, 43, of Danville, Ky., was serving as the chief of a U.N. truce observer group in southern Lebanon when he was abducted by gunmen Feb. 17 near the ancient port of Tyre, 50 miles south of Beirut.

The statement came three days after the Christian-run Voice of Lebanon radio station claimed that Higgins was killed during clashes between pro-Syrian and Iranian-backed Shia militias in southern Lebanon earlier this month.

Thursday’s Arabic-language statement from the organization, believed to be a Shia Muslim extremist group, was accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of Higgins, apparently to prove its authenticity.

The picture shows the balding Higgins with a stubbled gray beard, wearing a dark field jacket, his eyes looking down and away from the camera.

Both the United States and the United Nations have previously denied earlier charges by the kidnapers that Higgins was spying for the CIA.

L. Paul Bremer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, said the kidnapers’ latest charge “is of course nonsense.”