Fresh killings rock Lebanon, stir memories of civil war

by Pascal Mallet

BEIRUT, May 20 (AFP) - The assassination of one of the leaders of a radical pro-Syrian Palestinian group in Beirut on Monday and discovery of the body of  an anti-Syrian Christian militant have shaken Lebanon's precarious stability.

The murder on January 24 of the leader of former Christian warlord Elie Hobeika already sparked fears of renewed inter-confessional strife and revived the nightmare of the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon, where religious and political tensions still run high.

Hobeika, leader of the Lebanese Forces militia and a former minister who switched his allegiance to Syria towards the end of the war, was killed together with his three bodyguards in a car bomb in a Christian neighbourhood of Beirut.

The Lebanese government, the Syrian press, officials from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah and Hobeika's allies all accused Israel of assassinating the former warlord to prevent him from revealing his "secrets" on the role of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's capital.

The Jewish state denied the allegations, pointing out that Hobeika was hated in Lebanon by Muslims and Christians alike, and the assassination has yet to be solved. The case presents many similarities with the assassination early Monday in mainly Muslim west Beirut of Jihad Jibril, the son and heir apparent of the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), Ahmad Jibril.

The Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, was immediately accused of eliminating Jibril, whose movement has been fiercely opposed to the Jewish state for more than three decades. Israel again denied the allegations. A few hours later, the decomposed body of Ramzi Irani was discovered in the boot of his car after the Lebanese Forces activist who worked for the French oil giant TotalFinaElf went missing for almost two weeks.

Lebanese authorities had denied any implication in his disappearance, but the press expressed surprise that the anti-Syrian militant could have been abducted without the knowledge of Lebanese or Syrian intelligence.

On January 1, former MP Jean Ghanem, who was close to Hobeika, died in a car crash which at the time was put down to a heart attack. But Hobeika saw the circumstances as suspicious, according to L'Orient Le Jour newspaper.

As-Safir, a daily close to Syria, the main power-broker in Lebanon, warned after Hobeika's assassination that a return to car-bombs and assassinations in Beirut would prove that "dormant cells are ready to carry out Israel's intentions" in the country.

Another question mark hangs over Lebanon: How did Hezbollah capture, in October 2000, retired Israeli general Elhanan Tannenbaum, whom the fundamentalist Shiite Muslim group accused of being a Mossad agent? Since the 1978 and 1982 Israeli invasions, Lebanon has not been the scene of major military confrontations, despite continuing tensions between Hezbollah and the Israeli army in the disputed Shebaa Farms border area.

As Lebanon prepares to celebrate, on May 25, the second anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation, Monday's incidents showed it remains a favoured ground for settling scores.

Missing former Christian militant found dead in Beirut

BEIRUT, May 20 (AFP) - A former official from the banned Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) party was found dead in a Beirut neighborhood on Monday, almost two weeks after he went missing, judicial sources told AFP. Ramzi Irani's decomposed body was found in the trunk of his car on a road in the Caracas neighborhood of the western sector of the Lebanese capital, they said.

Irani disappeared on May 7 and his wife informed the authorities the next day that her husband had vanished after work. The body was found just hours after Irani's wife met Lebanese President Emile Lahoud to seek information on his fate.

It also came on the same day as a car bombing in west Beirut that killed Jihad Jibril, the elder son and heir apparent of Damascus-based prominent ultra-radical Palestinian militant Ahmad Jibril. Irani, a 36-year-old father of two children, was an engineer who worked for the past 10 years with Total Liban, a Beirut subsidiary of the French oil giant TotalFinaElf.

His wife called on the government to reveal the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, but prosecutor general Adnan Addum assured Irani's family that Irani was not arrested by any of the state security services. Lebanese Christian groups based in the United States blamed Syrian forces in Lebanon for the dissappearance. Other political groups, both pro- and anti-Syrian, called for the case to be investigated.

In August 2001, Lebanese army intelligence services rounded up around 200 members of the anti-Syrian Christian opposition without prior authorisation from the government.

All were freed except Tufiq Hindi, a top member of the LF, and two journalists. The three were condemned to prison terms of between three and four years for having contacts with Israel.

Son of Palestinian militant killed in Beirut car blast, Israel blamed

by Nagib Khazzaka

BEIRUT, May 20 (AFP) - The elder son and heir apparent of hardline Palestinian militant Ahmad Jibril was killed Monday in a Beirut car-bombing which his group promptly blamed on Israel and vowed to avenge. Jihad Jibril, a senior leader in Lebanon of his father's Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), was blown to pieces when he started his car, detonating explosives under the seat, police said.

"Mossad managed this time to assassinate my son after having tried in vain four times to do it," Ahmad Jibril told reporters at his headquarters in Damascus, referring to the Israeli intelligence service, as he received condolences.

Another PFLP-GC official told AFP in the Syrian capital on condition of anonymity that "the Zionist enemy is the first suspect and we are going to retaliate because they killed one of our military leaders." But Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon dismissed the accusations as "utter nonsense."

Police said that some two kilos (4.4 pounds) of explosives had been placed in the car, wrecking the white Peugeot 505 in the blast, which happened only metres (yards) from a police barracks in west Beirut's Mama Street, adjoining Mar Elias Boulevard. Jihad, who was born in 1964, is scheduled to be buried in Syria on Wednesday.

His body was handed over to his family later Monday, and mourners fired in the air as they bore it, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, through the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Barajneh in the suburbs of Beirut. Ahmad Jibril, grim-faced, said, "He is now a martyr, like the Palestinians who offer their lives daily in Palestine." "A few months ago we made the (Muslim) pilgrimage to Mecca (in Saudi Arabia) and Jihad told me that he asked God to be able to die a martyr," he added. "Everyone knew -- the Lebanese, Syrians and the Palestinians -- that he was someone serious. He was a military chief acting on the ground and knew very well the Zionist enemy, against whom he fought several times," he said.

According to the PFLP-GC, the baby-faced Jihad Jibril, who had blue eyes, chestnut hair and a beard, bore the rank of major in the organisation, after attending the Libyan military academy from 1981-3 and receiving parachute training.

In 1997 he was badly wounded in an explosion during an exercise in the Bekaa valley, and in 2000 he escaped an assassination attempt when his car came under fire near a PFLP-GC base south of Beirut. His younger brother Khaled told the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television by telephone that "it is certain that Israel benefits most because Jihad was responsible for the occupied territories." "We are all potential martyrs and it is not new that one of us falls martyr," said Khaled, adding that his brother was the PFLP-GC military official in Lebanon.

Ahmad Jibril, who normally resides in Damascus, is strongly opposed to any peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. His group maintains several bases in Lebanon, mainly south of the capital and in the eastern Bekaa valley.

At the height of the latest Israeli offensive on the Palestinian territories, PFLP-GC fighters fired Grad rockets from Lebanon into the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan in solidarity with the Palestinian uprising. Seven guerrillas from the group were arrested by Lebanese authorities, which have been under US pressure to maintain calm on the borders.

Beirut condemned the attacks while supporting the operations of its own Hezbollah movement, which is also backed by Syria, into the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms disputed border territory claimed by Lebanon. The last car bomb attack in Lebanon was on January 24, when Elie Hobeika, a former Israeli-allied Christian warlord in the country's 1975-1990 civil war who later went over to the Syrians, was killed. Fingers were then pointed both at Israel and at Syria, the main power broker in neighbouring Lebanon, but no progress in resolving the case has been officially announced.