Hizballah terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, convicted in Germany of murdering US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem aboard a hijacked airplane, has been freed. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)

BEIRUT - Hezbollah member Mohammed Ali Hamadi has returned to Lebanon after being secretly released in Germany, where he was serving a life sentence for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner and killing of a US navy diver, Hezbollah and Lebanese security sources said Tuesday.

Hamadi returned a few days ago, a Hezbollah source told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Beirut. A Lebanese security source confirmed that Hamadi entered Beirut four days ago aboard a commercial flight from Germany.

The sources did not indicate whether Hamadi stayed in Beirut after his return. He had been arrested on 13 January 1987 at Frankfurt airport after customs officials found liquid explosives in his luggage.

He was sentenced in 1989 for possession of explosives, hijacking a U.S. commercial passenger airliner in Athens to Beirut - TWA flight 847 - on 14 June 1985, beating and holding passengers aboard that flight, and murdering Robert Dean Stethem, a US Navy diver, on the same flight.

Looks like business as usual in Germany under Angela Merkel.

Commentators have speculated that Hamadi’s release may be connected to the freeing Sunday of German hostage Susanne Osthoff in Iraq. German authorities had already tried to use Hamadi as a bargaining chip in the late 1980s to secure the release of German hostages in Lebanon.