BEIRUT - Lebanese militant Samir Kantar, who is set to be freed from jail on Wednesday, has been serving a 542 jail sentence in Israel for a triple murder including the brutal killing of a four-year-old girl.

Born July 20, 1962, Kantar has spent almost two-thirds of his life as a prisoner of Israel after his 1980 conviction for the 1979 killings of Danny Haran, his daughter Einat and an Israeli policeman.

The murders in the coastal town of Nahariya shocked Israel to the core by its brutality as Kantar and co-militants shot dead Danny, 28, and battered Einat's skull with rifle butts.

Kantar, who has earned the title of longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel, was only 17 when he and three other members of the Palestine Liberation Front infiltrated Nahariya by sea from Lebanon.

Danny's wife, Smadar, recounted the fear and horror in a Washington Post article in May 2003.

"I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades," Smadar wrote about the militants who raided her home.

Smadar hid on the top floor of the house with the couple's younger daughter, Yael, aged two. Desperate that the toddler's cries would give them up, Smadar smothered Yael with her own hands.

"I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe." But instead the toddler choked to death.

Israeli soldiers and police chased the militants as they fled with Danny and Einat to the beach where "one of them (militants) shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see."

"Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kantar," Smadar said.

Two militants were killed in a shoot-out with the Israeli forces, while Kantar -- shot and wounded five times -- was arrested along with the fourth member of the commando Ahmad Abras.

Kantar and Abras were sentenced each to 542 years for murder.

Abras was set free in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange between Israel and the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah has repeatedly demanded the release of Kantar, a Druze who was captured three years before the militant group was founded in 1982.

Israel said on Sunday it will release five Lebanese prisoners on Wednesday, including Kantar, in exchange for two soldiers captured by Hezbollah two years ago.

An Internet website devoted to campaigning for his release said that Kantar earned a degree in sociology from a Tel Aviv college in 1992.

"The courses were sent to him and he sent his home-works, or 'cell-works' back to the college," it said.

"There isn't a prison in Israel that Samir Kantar has not visited yet and been submitted to its means of torture," the website said, adding that despite 28 years in detention his militant views have not changed.

"To him, the detention center was just another place for battle."

Kantar's fate has often been linked to that of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose warplane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 during the country's civil war.

Israeli authorities have said information on Arad's fate was a precondition for a swap with Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has handed Israel a report it had drafted on the fate of Arad, in which it said the airman had died in captivity. However, Israel remains sceptical over the validity of its findings. -AFP