FRANKFURT: Freed US hostage Tom Sutherland flew home from Germany for
his first Thanksgiving dinner with his family since being kidnapped in
Lebanon more than six years ago.
Sutherland, 60, left after six days in a US miltary hospital in
Wiesbaden, where freed American hostages stop first for medical care and
debriefings.
''They treated us great in there and it's been marvellous,'' he said
before being driven to nearby Frankfurt airport with his wife Jean and
two of their three daughters.
''We're flying to Dallas and then San Francisco,'' added Sutherland,
whose third daughter lives in California.
US officials shielded Sutherland from the press at the crowded
airport, where he and his family were whisked onto a scheduled flight.
The family was reunited in Wiesbaden last Monday, one day after he was
freed along with British hostage Terry Waite.
Sutherland's wife Jean said last week they wanted to spend the
Thanksgiving holiday this Thursday in California with their daughter
Ann, whose pregnancy kept her from coming to Germany.
Scottish-born Sutherland, a naturalised US citizen, was Dean of
Agriculture at American University of Beirut when he was kidnapped in
June 1985.
He was the second-longest held Western hostage in Lebanon after Terry
Anderson, Middle East bureau chief of the Associated Press, kidnapped
three months earlier and still a captive.
Sutherland and Waite reported that their Islamic fundamentalist
captors had told them Anderson and fellow Americans Joseph Cicippio and
Alann Steen would be released this month.
''We really hope they will all be freed this year. Tom is certainly
hopeful,'' Jean told reporters last week.
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