The World - News from Feb. 17, 1989

A Shiite Muslim leader said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, abducted a year ago today while serving as chief of a U.N. observer unit in Lebanon, is alive despite his captors’ statement that he was sentenced to death as a spy. “He’ll be released eventually” by the pro-Iranian Shiite extremists who seized him, said Abdul Majid Saleh, political officer of the Amal militia in the southern Lebanon port of Tyre. Higgins, from Danville, Ky., was on temporary duty as chief of the U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization, a 76-member unit that monitored the Lebanon-Israel border and was part of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.