BEIRUT, March 22 (AFP) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) hopes to gain swift access to Mustapha Dirani, the militant Shiite Muslim leader held in Israel who has been tortured, an ICRC spokesman said Wednesday.
Henry Fournier told the Lebanese Foreign Ministry's Secretary General, Zuhair Hamdane, that the ICRC had been discussing the matter with the highest authorities in Israel over the past few days.
"We hope to be able to have access to Dirani as soon as possible," he told reporters after meeting Hamdane.
Talks with the Israelis were aimed at setting up a visit with Dirani, he said, but he added that the ICRC had been trying to arrange such a visit since 1994.
On March 14, a day after Dirani's Israeli lawyer Tzvi Rish said his client had been tortured, Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss wrote to the ICRC and the United Nations calling for them to intervene in the case.
Rish filed a $1.5 million law suit against Israel, saying Dirani had been systematically beaten and raped by his Israeli jailers.
Dirani has been held without trial in Israel since being kidnapped in Lebanon in 1994. Israel is holding him to get news of airman Ron Arad, who disappeared after being shot down in combat over Lebanon in 1986.
Arad was captured by the pro-Syrian Amal movement when Dirani was the movement's intelligence chief.
Dirani's political organization, Faithful Amal, later split from Amal and is now close to the Hizbullah movement.
Fournier said that during his meeting with Hamdane, he also offered the ICRC's help with humanitarian work in southern Lebanon in the context of the changing situation there.
Israel announced earlier this month that its troops would pull out of the self-declared "security zone" they have occupied for 22 years by July, with or without a deal with Syria and Lebanon.
