DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. -- The body o? Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins, killed in captivity in Lebanon in 1989, arrived Tuesday at Dover Air Force Base where a positive identification will be made.
The body will then be prepared for burial, which could take place as early as Friday in Virginia.
It will be a bittersweet Christmas for Higgins' wife, Marine Maj. Robin Higgins, who also marked her birthday and anniversary on Monday.
'Fourteen years ago yesterday, on my birthday, Rich married me and 14 years later, he's coming home to me in a flag-draped coffin,' she said in an interview on ABC's 'Good Morning America.'
The body was expected to arrive Tuesday afternoon at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, said base spokesman Capt. Christian Geisel.
'The remains will be officially identified by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner and then transported to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for an honors ceremony,' Geisel said.
Higgins will be buried at the military cemetery in Quantico, Va., he said.
'Of course, this is a very difficult time of year, anyway,' Robin Higgins told ABC. 'As the live American hostages came home to the joys of their families, I knew, and my family knew, that we would not be sharing in that but that there was a good possibility that we would get him home and would be able to bury him with his Marines and so that was something that we could hold on to.'
Higgins's decomposed body was dumped late Saturday on a street in the sprawling region of Haret Hreik in Beirut's southern suburbs.
The body was turned over to U.S. Embassy officials and flown to Cyprus. White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the body was transferred to a military transport plane and flown to the mortuary at Dover for official identification.
Higgins was kidnapped by a band linked to the Iranian-financed Hezbollah while serving with the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon in February 1988 and was reported killed in July 1989.
The captors had distributed a grim videotape said to be showing Higgins dangling from a gallows after accusing him of espionage on fundamentalists' activities in southern Lebanon.
The handing over of Higgins's body came three days after Perez de Cuellar confirmed Friday that the kidnappers of the U.N. officer and thd remains of anothez%ais3qng U.S. citizen, William Buckley,"will be returned soon.
Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped in March 1984 by the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Jihad, which announced his execution in October 1985.
'Well, that's a very difficult question for me to get into and, obviously, I don't want to say or do anything that might jeopardize the return of Mr. Buckley's remains,' she said in the ABC interview. 'My feeling is that there's got to be someone that's greater than you and me to judge a man who will kidnap, torture, and murder an unarmed United Nations peace-keeper, who will hang his body on videotape for his daughter and his wife and his family to watch, and then will dump his body on a street in Beirut.'
