May 25, 2002	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 12,1423

PARIS, May 24: Five former French hostages of the Hezbollah, and the wife of a sixth slain man, have decided to file a suit against their captors before a French court — 17 years after the incident in Beirut.

The suit, technically a “complaint against X,” as the identity of all the captors has not yet been determined, was filed on Wednesday before the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris.

The decision to file the suit comes a few days before the arrival in France of a delegation of Lebanese parliamentarians, which also reportedly includes a member of the Hezbollah involved in their kidnapping.

The former hostages, most of whom were kidnapped in Beirut by the Hezbollah in 1987, include journalists Jean-Paul Kauffmann and Roger Auque, diplomat Marcel Carton, TV cameramen George Hansen and Jean-Louis Normandin.

A sixth man, sociologist Michel Seurat, on a mission for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) was kidnapped on May 22, 1985, by the Islamic Jihad — who claimed in March 1986 that he had died while in captivity.