BEIRUT, Lebanon: Affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese satellite television station, al-Manar, says it has footage of Libya's president Muammar Gaddafi in which the embattled ruler has confessed to the missing Shia cleric, Imam Moussa as-Sadr’s presence in the crisis-hit North African state.

“This person (Imam Moussa) disappeared and nobody knows how. I wish we knew who's responsible for the issue. On one hand we missed him and on the other Libya's image has been tarnished; namely, we invited him and he accepted. He came to Libya and vanished. Someone seeks to disrepute Libya,” Gaddafi is quoted as saying in the video recording more than 25 years ago.

Some 30 years ago, Sadr and two of his companions went missing during an official visit to Libya. The case has been a long-standing sore issue in Lebanon, where authorities blame Gaddafi and his aides for the disappearance of the three.

Accompanied by two of his companions, Mohammed Yaqoub and Abbas Badreddin, Sadr was scheduled to meet with officials from the government of Gaddafi.

At the time, Libyan authorities claimed that the Iranian-born influential cleric and his colleagues had caught a flight to Rome, Italy. But Italian officials said the three men were never on board the plane.

Sadr went to Lebanon in 1959 to work for the civil rights of Shias in the southern city of Tyre. In 1974, a year before Lebanon's 15-year civil war broke out, he founded the Movement of the Deprived, attracting thousands of followers.

In 1975, Sadr founded Amal, the first major resistance and political force for Lebanon's Shias who were historically under the rule of Christians and Sunnis.

Imam Sadr was an impressive figure, well over 1.85 meters (6.0') tall, wore the black turban of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and was a skilled orator, with a Persian-accented Arabic.

Most of Sadr's followers are convinced that Gaddafi ordered his assassination in a dispute over Libyan payments to Lebanese groups, but the Imam's family argues he could still be alive in a Libyan jail.

In 2008, the government in Beirut issued an arrest warrant for Gaddafi over Sadr's disappearance.
Meanwhile, a political analyst Roula Talj from Beirut said in an interview on Tuesday the son of Gaddafi had denied previous allegations that the visiting Lebanese leader had left for Italy.

“He did not admit that Imam Moussa as-Sadr was alive but … told me that they [Moussa as-Sadr and his companions] never left Libya,” Talj quoted Seif al-Islam Gaddafi as saying.

“And that all the allegations about them being in Italy were wrong,” she added.

“From my own analysis and people's reaction to this, I believe he is still alive,” the expert said in response to a question on the possibility of Sadr's livelihood.