Qantar: reviled in Israel, a hero in Lebanon

By Yara Bayoumy

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israel's longest-held Lebanese prisoner, reviled by Israelis as a man with blood on his hands, will get a hero's welcome when he returns home on Wednesday.

Samir Qantar, who as a teenager in 1979 took part in a guerrilla raid in Israel in which two children died, is part of a prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel is to free five Lebanese guerrillas in return for two of its soldiers captured by the Lebanese Shi'ite group in 2006, whom Israeli Prime Minister has said are probably dead.

"After 30 years of waiting -- I was only a year and a few months old (when he was captured), I never knew him except through pictures and letters. The moment I meet him will be exceptional," Qantar's brother, Bassam, told Reuters.

"It's a moment I've always dreamed of and that stayed in my imagination," he said, adding that fireworks, gatherings and billboards had been prepared to mark his brother's return.

Qantar, one of seven brothers and sisters, was 17 when Israeli police arrested him. He was one of four Palestinian Liberation Front guerrillas who burst into a flat in Israel's northern city of Nahariyah and killed a policeman and another man and his four-year-old daughter.

The man's wife hid in a wardrobe with another daughter but accidentally smothered her while trying to stop her crying.

An Israeli court sentenced Qantar to 542 years in jail.

In the Druze village of Abey, Qantar's hometown, his family has hung a big portrait of him, along with a poem in his praise.