BEIRUT, Lebanon, Feb 06, 2004 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Iran's foreign minister said Friday that his country would do its best to help determine the fate of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, although Iran is not part of the official negotiations in a prisoner swap between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group.

Kamal Kharrazi also said that four Iranians who were kidnapped in Lebanon two decades ago are alive in Israel. Kharrazi was in Lebanon for two days of talks on the missing Iranians, whom Israel has long denied that it is holding.

"Concerning Mr. Arad, I confirm that if we have any information we will exert maximum efforts to help in this matter, but I would also like to say that the main sides of these negotiations are Hezbollah and the Germans," said Kharrazi.

Kharrazi was speaking at a news conference after meeting with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, which negotiated a prisoners' swap deal with Israel that last week led to the release of 400 Palestinians and more than 30 Arabs from Israeli prisons. In return, Hezbollah released a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers that it ambushed in 2000.

In the second phase of the German-mediated talks between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese group has promised to find concrete information on Israeli Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. Israeli reports have often said Arad has been taken to Iran, but Iran has always denied this.

"No one knows where Arad is and in which country he is," the Iranian official said, adding that Nasrallah is determined to try find out what happened to Arad.

In return for satisfactory information on Arad, Israel would release Samir Kantar, a Lebanese militant who has been in an Israeli prison since 1979 for killing three Israelis.

Kharrazi said Nasrallah told him that the issue of the missing Iranians will be raised in the second phase of negotiations.

The four, including two diplomats, were abducted at a checkpoint manned by an Israeli-backed militia north of Beirut on July 4, 1982, during Israel's invasion.

"From our point of view they are alive and they are in Israel," Kharrazi said, sitting behind photographs of the four.

The militia, the now-disbanded Lebanese Forces, says the four were killed, but their bodies have never been found.

"According to our information they (Iranians) were transferred from an area north of Beirut, which was under Israeli control then, in a boat to Israel," said Kharrazi, who was joined on his trip by relatives of the missing men.

Kharrazi said Lebanese President Emile Lahoud also promised to do his best to uncover the whereabouts of the men, including possibly questioning Samir Geagea, former commander of the Lebanese Forces, who has been in prison since his group was banned in 1994.

Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the 1982 invasion of Lebanon as then-defense minister, recently said he did not know what happened to the four.

"We have nothing to do with this," Sharon said. "It's an internal Lebanese affair."

Kharrazi said that Israel denied in the past the existence of some Lebanese in its prisons but then they were released by the Jewish state.

He said Israel "should come forward with proof if it has it."

By BASSEM MROUE Associated Press Writer