BEIRUT, Lebanon - Private Lebanese television LBCI said Thursday it would air next week video footage "showing the Israeli airman Ron Arad for the first time since he disappeared in Lebanon in 1986".

LBCI's "Great Swap" program would show Arad speaking before a camera, the station said.

Arad, an Israeli air force navigator, disappeared after ejecting from an F-4 Phanton fighter-bomber over Lebanon, and became a cause celebre in his homeland.

An LBCI director told AFP the images dated from 1988, two years after he was captured by Shiite militants from the pro-Syrian movement Amal.

In the United States, CNN television said Wednesday that a brother of Arad has seen the promotional footage and considered it genuine.

But in January, the head of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah said Arad was probably dead, even though he had no proof.

"It someone was holding him, they would have tried to get a deal in return" for his release, Hassan Nasrallah said in a television interview.

"He could had fled into a mountainous area or a ravine. Maybe he is dead and all trace lost, but there is no proof," he added.

Amal security chief Mustapha Dirani, who was kidnapped by Israeli commandos in 1994, is believed to have turned Arad over to Hezbollah, which reportedly held the airman in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

In the second stage of a prisoner exchange launched in 2004, Israel was supposed to obtain information about Arad while freeing Lebanese Samir Kantar, but the agreement was never finalised.

That same year, a private Israeli group offered a 10-million-dollar reward for credible information on the aviator's fate.

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