Beirut: Amid signs that a fifth abducted soldier (of at least 27 held by Daesh and Jabhat Al Nusra) deserted the Lebanese Army and joined one of the extremist groups, the Minister of Justice, Ashraf Rifi, announced his support to barter the kidnapped soldiers with prisoners held at Roumieh Prison.

According to the pro-March-14 Al Liwa’ newspaper, the release of the abducted soldiers remained a top priority for Prime Minister Tammam Salam’s Government as well as to Speaker Nabih Berri. Rifi believed, nevertheless, that the best means to secure a quick release was to barter them with some of the Islamist prisoners even if this was a hugely controversial position in a country that lacked political consensus.

While the total number of prisoners concerned in the matter was publicly unknown, the minister revealed that “the trial of 24 Islamists were completed, and that 23 of them were found to be innocent.” Fifteen others were awaiting trial that, Rifi acknowledged, could be “completed by the end of this year.” Although the minister did not comment on the excessive delays in trying the accused in a timely manner since several were jailed more than three years ago, he recognized that lingering cases were political in nature, not related to judicial shortcomings.

Indeed, the political dilemmas that Rifi identified, hovered around the deployment of Hezbollah militiamen in Syria as well as the party’s refusal to encourage negotiations. The minister considered both to be strategic mistakes and cautioned those who contemplated additional coordination with Damascus not to commit fresh blunders. Beirut rejected “coordination with the Syrian regime and its army,” affirmed Rifi, because any involvement of the Lebanese Army in the ongoing Syrian Civil War was bound to spillover at home. What he recommended was for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from Syria and lift the party’s veto to negotiate the release of the abducted soldiers.

Notwithstanding denials to the contrary, serious negotiations were under way, brokered by an unnamed Qatari go-between. In fact, General Security chief Major-General Abbas Ebrahim, whose track record was exemplary—he secured the releases of the 11 Shiite pilgrims in October 2013 after a 17-months ordeal, as well as the 13 Ma‘alulah nuns who were freed in March 2014 after nearly 4 months of detention—traveled to Doha to follow up on the case of the abducted soldiers and policemen, which confirmed that the Qatari mediation efforts were not broken as alleged by several commentators last week.

The pro-Hezbollah daily Al Safir reported that Ebrahim would try to unravel the mysteries surrounding the case. In the event, and despite many critics, the affable officer was probably the principal qualified individual to deal with the case. Although the capture of the troops and the failure of authorities to secure their release nearly 3 months after their abductions left a vast majority of Lebanese citizens bewildered, most understood that Ebrahim—with Qatari and, perhaps, Turkish mediation—was the only individual that could prevent fresh beheadings. Two soldiers, Ali Al Sayyed and Abbas Medlej, were beheaded on August 29 and September 6, 2014, respectively. Another soldier, Mohammad Maarouf Hammiyeh was allegedly executed on September 19, 2014, although family members denied the news.

Families of the soldiers remained fearful that Daesh and Al Nusra extremists would kill their loved ones, which was the reason why Major-General Ebrahim’s ongoing efforts, along with Minister Rifi’s announcement that a potential barter might be possible, were universally acclaimed as good news.