A statement said that captive Imad Loubnan Ayyad was freed at noon following weeks of negotiations, adding that his release was in exchange for 2 gunmen who were in Hezbollah’s custody.
The captives' relatives have been staging sit-ins and blocking roads in order to urge the release of the troops who were kidnapped by militants from the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front in the border town of Arsal back in August. The al-Nusra Front released on Saturday (September 20) a video depicting the execution of the Lebanese soldier Mohammad Hamieh with a bullet to the head. The video also showed Lebanese soldier Ali al-Bazzal pleading his family to act or else he would face execution. In the same regard, Turkey's Anatolia news agency quoted on Saturday (September 06) a commander of the Islamic State as saying that the group had executed one of the captured Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers for trying to escape. "LAF soldier Abbas Medlej tried to escape from prison and after he attempted to open fire at IS members, we took control of the situation by slaughtering him," the Islamic State- Qalamoun branch said in a statement. Also on August 28, the Islamic State posted photos and a video online depicting a militant beheading a blindfolded hostage who was identified as Lebanese Armed Forces Sergeant Ali al-Sayyed. On Sunday (August 31), Lebanon's military said an al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebel group released five members of the Lebanese security forces captured earlier in August in a cross-border raid. The men were taken hostage when militants from Syria took over the Lebanese border town of Arsal for five days before withdrawing toward the Syrian frontier, taking with them Lebanese soldiers and policemen as hostages. The clashes were the most dangerous spillover of violence from the civil war in neighboring Syria. The clashes flared up when Syrian gunmen deployed across the region after the Lebanese Armed Forces arrested Imad Jomaa at a checkpoint. The detention of Imad Jomaa, the leader of the Fajr al-Islam Brigade, had caused security tension in the border town of Arsal, claiming the lives of 20 soldiers and leaving 86 others injured. While the release of the five men provided a degree of relief, concerns remain about the troops and policemen still in captivity.