BEIRUT/JEDDAH, 20 October 2004 — Twenty-seven years after his mysterious disappearance in Libya, Imam Mousa Sadr is making a comeback to haunt relations between Beirut and Tripoli.

Two passports believed to belong to Sadr and his aide Muhammad Yaqub were handed to the Lebanese authorities by the Italian government yesterday. The documents show that Sadr and Yaqub entered Rome and had their passports stamped days after their disappearance.

Sadr, a leader of the Lebanese Shiite community, traveled to the Libyan capital in August 1978 along with two aides. He held a long meeting with Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi that, by all accounts, was acrimonious. Days later the Lebanese government accused Libya of having organized the disappearance. Later, Beirut broke all ties with Libya.

Lebanese sources yesterday described the reappearance of the passports as “a suspicious development”. Italy claims that the passports were discovered recently when a number of illegal immigrants were arrested with a stock of stolen travel documents.

“The entire episode is strange,” a Lebanese source said yesterday. “Just days after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visited Qaddafi, we get the missing passports.”

The implication is that Berlusconi arranged the reappearance of the passports as a gesture of good will to Libya with which Italy is engaged in multibillion-dollar business negotiations.

Sadr was born in Iran but was dispatched to Lebanon in 1960 to represent the Grand Ayatollahs of Qom, the principal center of Shiism in Iran. In the 1970s, he created the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harkat Al-Mahroumin), which was later transformed into the Amal (Hope) movement.

Sadr who hailed from a major clerical family was related to the late Ayatollah Khomeini as well as the Iraqi rebel leader Muqtada Al-Sadr. Another prominent relative of the missing Imam is Iran’s President Muhammad Khatami.

Imam Sadr’s disappearance has been a subject of heated exchanges between Lebanon and Libya at all Arab League ministerial meetings and summits since 1978.

The reappearance of the two passports strengthens Libya’s claim that Sadr left Tripoli safe and sound. But that opens another mystery: how did the Imam vanish on his way home via Rome?