Jackie Mann, CBE, DFM (11 June 1914 – 12 November 1995) was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years.
Born in Northampton on 11 June 1914, Mann joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in Reading in 1938.
He underwent plastic surgery at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, where he was a founder member of the Guinea Pig Club.
On 13 May 1989, Mann was kidnapped in Beirut by Khalaya al-Kifah al-Musallah or "Armed Struggle Cells", a previously unknown terrorist group linked to the pro-Iranian Shi'ite Muslim militant organisation, Hezbollah.
The Foreign Office and embassy had renewed warnings to British citizens still living in Beirut to leave immediately following the Salman Rushdie affair in February of that year.
In September 1989,[5] it was reported that his wife Sunnie had been told that Mann was dead, by a man who asked to meet her in a Beirut shopping centre.
He had been held at the same time as other UK and Irish hostages in Lebanon, notably journalist John McCarthy, church envoy Terry Waite and author Brian Keenan.
On his release, he was taken firstly to Damascus, Syria, where he was reunited with his wife, and then flown by VC10 to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, and spent some time recuperating and debriefing in the Officers' Mess, before returning to normal life.