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At midweek, Israel arranged for Western newsmen to visit Marjayoun. The trip demonstrated not only that the Finns were in good condition, but that the Israelis, if they chose to do so, could have ended the incident quickly by putting pressure on the S.L.A. The situation took a comic turn late in the week when the eleven S.L.A. men, all of whom happened to be Shi'ites in an overwhelmingly Christian militia, told U.N. and Red Cross officials that they had no desire to return to the S.L.A. Confronted with this information, the S.L.A. commander, General Antoine Lahd, released the Finnish soldiers the next day.
This was the world that had produced the nightmare of Flight 847, an ordeal that continued without resolution as the new week began. There were hints that Israel might be willing to release its Shi'ite detainees if the U.S. asked it to do so; after all, only a month ago, the Israelis had exchanged 1,150 prisoners, including some world-class terrorists, for three of their own servicemen. At the same time, there were reports that the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean had invoked a "radio silence" on its movements -- a possible sign of action to come. As of Sunday night, there were further reports of military activity around Cyprus and of the departure of a U.S. naval vessel from the Israeli port of Haifa.
Perhaps nothing so aptly epitomized the chaos of Lebanon for Americans last week as the fate of the body of the young man, said by the hijackers to be a U.S. Marine, who had been murdered on Flight 847. After lying on the tarmac for two hours, the body, with a bullet wound in the head, had been taken by an International Red Cross ambulance to a morgue at the American University Hospital in Muslim West Beirut. U.S. officials, based on the other side of the "green line" in Christian-dominated East Beirut, were unable to retrieve it for 24 hours. Not until Sunday morning did a State Department spokesman announce that the body was at last on its way to a U.S. air base in Spain for identification. Used first as proof of the hijackers' resolve, the stranded corpse had thus become a symbol of the obstacles and divisions that afflict the terrorists' homeland.