Missing Marine surfaces in Lebanon

WASHINGTON -- The Lebanese-born US Marine who was feared beheaded after being shown on Arab television as a hostage turned up yesterday at the US Embassy in Lebanon, but the mystery surrounding his disappearance deepened.

Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun contacted the embassy in Beirut yesterday and arranged to be picked up -- about 500 miles from where he was last seen by his unit in Iraq on June 19 at Camp Fallujah west of Baghdad and reported missing the next day. The US military said it did not know how he traveled from Iraq to Lebanon or whether he had deserted his unit.

"I have nothing for you," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told reporters yesterday. When pressed about Hassoun's disappearance, he added, "I'm saying we don't know, and there's no sense speculating because most of the speculation to this point has been confused."

The 24-year-old Marine surfaced after a flurry of video footage on Arab television and conflicting website statements the past two weeks left his fate uncertain. A videotape aired June 27 showed him blindfolded with a sword hanging over his head, with his presumed captors threatening to behead him. On Saturday, statements attributed to Muslim militants posted on extremist websites said he had been beheaded.

In a conflict in which brutal killings, kidnappings, and declarations from obscure terrorist groups have become commonplace, Hassoun's case has brought particular confusion.

"There's a lot we don't know," said Major Jason Johnston, a Marine Corps spokesman. He said that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is looking into the circumstances surrounding Hassoun's absence, leaving open all possibilities, including whether the disappearance was staged to seem like a kidnapping.

Johnston said that Hassoun, a translator and truck driver with the Marines, had been "returned to military custody" in Lebanon but that he did not know whether Hassoun would be returned to Iraq.

For now, the military is following Department of Defense procedures for the treatment of hostages who have been released, Johnston said, adding, "Our primary concern at this point is his mental and health well-being."

Hassoun has close relatives in Lebanon, where he was born, as well as in the United States. At Hassoun's home in West Jordan, Utah, where neighbors and family members held vigils for the missing Marine and where media trucks swarmed in recent days, a man who answered the phone thanked the public for praying for Hassoun, but declined to comment further.

Near the home of Hassoun's relatives in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, a gun battle erupted after it was announced he was in Beirut. His relatives traded fire with another family who taunted them by referring to the Marine and his family as US agents.

Hassoun, who moved to Utah from Lebanon in the early 1990s, joined the Marines in January 2002. He was last seen by his unit June 19, Johnston said. Just over a week after his disappearance, as the world's attention focused on the handover of authority in Iraq, the Arab television station Al-Jazeera broke the news of his apparent capture.

At the time, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the coalition deputy operations chief, said Hassoun had taken "an unauthorized absence," suggesting that he probably had been captured as he tried to make the trek to Lebanon, where his father, brother, and other relatives live.

"Based on his personal situation, there was reason to suspect that he was heading over to Lebanon," Kimmitt said June 28.

Al-Jazeera aired footage of Hassoun and his identity card. The station reported that an obscure group that identified itself as Islamic Response, the security wing of the National Islamic Resistance--1920 Revolution Brigades, announced that it would kill him if some Iraqi prisoners were not released from jail.

Al-Jazeera also reported that the group said it had lured him from the base using an attractive woman.

Other news reports suggested that he had fled his unit after seeing a fellow soldier die.

Confusion deepened last weekend, as a statement purportedly from a second group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, said Hassoun had been "slaughtered" -- only to be rebutted a day later by another statement purportedly from the group. On Monday, Islamic Response issued a statement saying Hassoun had been taken to safety at an undisclosed location after he "announced his forgiveness and his determination not to go back to the US forces."

Statements from Hassoun's family in Utah and in Lebanon added to the mystery. At first, his relatives begged the kidnappers to spare his life.

"He is not a fighter," Hassoun's father, Ali Hassoun, said in Tripoli on June 28. "I hope that they will respond favorably to my appeal. May God reward them."

But early this week, his relatives told reporters they had received a sign that he was safe, without giving other details.

"We received a sign that he is alive and he is released and everything is OK," his older brother, Sami Hassoun, told The New York Times in a telephone interview Tuesday from Lebanon. "The sign is something that came directly from him. There is something that nobody else could possibly know. It's a certain clue. He is alive and he is released."

The family's statements prompted two FBI agents to meet with the family in Utah on Wednesday to determine where it was getting information about Hassoun, an FBI spokesman said. The bureau would not give details on what it had learned.

Yesterday, there were no overt signs of joy or preparations at the family residence in Tripoli, an apartment on the second floor of a six-story building in the low-income Abu Samra district of Lebanon's second-largest city.

Brigadier General David Rodriguez, the Defense Department's deputy director for operations, said he did not know how Hassoun traveled several hundred miles from Iraq to Lebanon, which may have required crossing into Syria.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com.