Terry Waite returns to Lebanon for charity

Tonight at around 11.30pm, Terry Waite will step off a flight from Heathrow on to the tarmac of a Middle-Eastern country with which his name is indelibly associated.

Last time he travelled to Lebanon he was to spend five terrifying years in captivity, most of it in solitary confinement.

There are few who would volunteer to return to the place where they endured their darkest hours. Yet Mr Waite is returning to Beirut willingly.

"Lebanon holds no ghosts or horrors for me," says the man who was bundled out of the country in the boot of a car, having been released by his kidnappers after 1,763 days in captivity.

He said: "The Lebanese people are warm, generous and friendly. I don't agree with what some of them did but I always bear in mind they suffered far more than any ex-pat like me."

Mr Waite is returning to Beirut to visit projects run in the Palestinian refugee camps by the charity Y Care International-which he set up with friends 20 years ago to help dispossessed children.

But the former Church Of England envoy added that he fears the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay and the Palestinian conflict have created another generation of terrorists even more extreme than those who took him hostage.