Propaganda tag shocks Qana rescuer

Dubai: Several hours after Israel's barbaric bombing in Qana, Salam Daher emerges from the wreckage with the body of nine-month-old Abbas, a blue pacifier still pinned to his nightshirt. It has been hours of heart-rending digging for the Lebanese head of Civil Defence in Tyre.

He holds up the infant and, click, a photographer snaps another picture of Daher, in his trademark green helmet, displaying a civilian victim of Israeli bombs for the world to see.

"I am just a civil defence worker. I have done this job all my life," Daher says. Which is why he is aghast when some bloggers and websites label him as a member of Hezbollah, showing off bodies as propaganda. "That just isn't true," he says.

Daher, a member of the civil defence for 20 years, has been photographed with bodies of the dead in two wars first in 1996 and most recently with Abbas on July 30 both after Israeli attacks in Qana. On April 18, 1996, Daher was one of the first to arrive in Qana after Israeli artillery slammed into a UN compound where 800 people had taken shelter.

With inputs from AP & EPA