Gergi Hanna

In September 1985, following the request of the research committee founded in the Lebanese University, all classes were suspended for an hour in many of the university’s campuses. This symbolic action, in addition to the gatherings that took place on that same day, were all organized to demand the release of the professors who had been kidnapped: Maha Hourani, Raji Khoury and Gergi Hanna.

My name is Gergi. I was one of them. I was an electrical engineering professor.

Thanks to a scholarship I was awarded, I was able to go study in Germany, where I got my doctorate degree and met my wife Barbara. After spending twelve years there, we decided that it was time for us to return to Lebanon with our daughter Doris.

We were living in Jdayel, nearby Byblos, and we would drive into Beirut every day to go to work. Barbara would give classes at the Amlieh institute and I at the Faculty of Science in Hadath. But when commuting became an even greater danger hazard, we rented a house in Sakiyet El Janzeer. During the siege on Beirut by the Israelis however, my wife and two daughters went to find shelter in our house near Byblos, while waiting on the situation in Beirut to cool down, before moving to Germany for my daughters to return to school.

On September 10th 1985, two days before their return to Lebanon, I got kidnapped as I was going back home from the Faculty of Science’s campus, that had been relocated temporarily neighboring the Unesco. My car got stopped at Tallet El Khayat by armed men, positioned at a checkpoint facing the Tele Liban.

My relatives had no information about my fate until ten years later, when a prisoner who had been released from a Syrian prison reached out for them to inform them that we had been imprisoned together. He told them that I had been detained in Lebanon for two years before being transferred to Syria’s Mazze prison.

After hearing this terrible news, my relatives rushed to that prison. They managed to see my name on the registration sheets but were not allowed to see me. The only explanation they got for my arrest was that I was accused of being a spy and for that, I was convicted to life in prison.

Despite my family, my friends, my colleagues and my students’ mobilization, I was never freed.

My name is Gergi Hanna. Do not let my story end here.