Contacts With Hostages’ Captors Reported by Waite

BEIRUT — Church of England envoy Terry Waite met with Lebanese leaders Thursday in his latest effort to win freedom for American and other hostages and also reported having contacts with the hostages’ captors.

Waite said later, “I think we are on the way to having a resolution to a longstanding problem.”

Waite talked with reporters after an 80-minute conference with Parliament Speaker Hussein Husseini, a Shia Muslim. He did not elaborate on his optimistic remark.

Waite, a special assistant to Robert A. K. Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said he was in contact during the night with the Muslim extremist captors of the Western hostages, but he declined to elaborate on the meeting.

“Yes,” he replied when asked if he had had contact with the kidnapers. “But I do not want to say anything more for the moment. Everything is OK. I am not saying anything further. The work is going ahead well. That is all.”

Waite, who has been credited with helping obtain the freedom of three American hostages in the past 16 months, also met separately with Sunni Muslim religious leader Sheik Hassan Khaled.

“The hostage crisis is linked to deep-rooted political issues that need to be sorted out,” Waite said after his meeting with Khaled.

The white-turbaned Khaled told reporters, “Lebanon as a whole is a hostage, and no one in the world is lifting a finger to release it from its bondage.”