Unfortunately, all they got their hands on was Hassan Nasarallah, grocer, as opposed to Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah leader.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/15343784.htm
Hassan Dib Nasrallah, a Lebanese grocer, is a slight man with short gray whiskers. He’s 54, bald and looks nothing like the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who, at 46, is full-faced with a dark beard.
Which was why Nasrallah the grocer was surprised by the first question from his interrogators after a daring Israeli commando raid snatched him from his neighborhood Aug. 1 and spirited him and four others aboard helicopters back to Israel for questioning.
“They said, `Are you Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah?'” the grocer recalled, using an honorific that designates Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah as a descendant of Muhammad. “I said no.”
Wednesday, Nasrallah was back in his hometown 60 miles north of the Israeli border after a three-week absence that may be the oddest saga yet to come from Israel’s 34-day campaign against Hezbollah. Israeli officials turned Nasrallah, his son and three other men over to U.N. peacekeepers Monday after an Israeli civil rights lawyer filed a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice demanding their release.
At the time Nasrallah was taken, Israeli officials would say only that they’d been seeking top-level Hezbollah officials when they sent a 100-member commando force to this city not far from the Syrian border. It was the deepest ground incursion into Lebanon by Israeli forces during the conflict.
They pulled Nasrallah and the other men from a basement where they’d taken shelter from Israeli airstrikes with neighbors, marched them for nearly two hours to waiting helicopters and flew them to Israel.
For the next 14 hours, Nasrallah recalled, interrogators repeatedly asked him whether he was the head of Hezbollah. Then they asked him whether he was a member of the militant Islamist group.
“They thought all Shiites were Hezbollah, and I said no, they are not,” Nasrallah said. “I’m an independent; I’m with no one.”
So the interrogators changed their line of questioning.
“Are you related to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah?” they asked.
“Only our names are the same,” he answered. Hassan Nasrallah is a common name in Lebanon, and in Hassan Dib Nasrallah’s family alone there are many. He was named after his grandfather, his oldest grandson is Hassan Nasrallah, his brother’s son is Hassan Nasrallah and his uncle is Hassan Nasrallah.
“They knew I wasn’t him,” he said, describing how interrogators popped in to look at him and double-check his identity.
They turned to his son Bilal.
“You are the son of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” they told him, according to his father. Bilal told them no.
Eventually, all five were transferred to a prison where they shared a cell for 20 days until their release. They were questioned sporadically and their arms and legs were shackled during interrogation, but otherwise they weren’t mistreated, said another of the men, Ahmed al-Awta.
On Wednesday, Hassan Dib Nasrallah was in good spirits, surrounded by well-wishers who came to congratulate al-Awta and him on their safe return.
“How was it?” a visiting cleric asked.
“It was fine,” he said. “We are fine. Praise be to God.”
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, acknowledged Wednesday that an error was made.
“There was a situation where people we picked up assuming they were Hezbollah fighters turned out not to be,” he said. “When it became clear in the interview that they were not Hezbollah, they were released as quickly as possible. This particular grocer was one such person.”
He laughed at the idea that the common names had anything to do with it.
“There was no case of mistaken identity. We know very well who the real Hassan Nasrallah is,” he said.