November 22, 2008
Lebanese journalist, critic of Syria, killed in car bombing
BEIRUT, Lebanon - For six months, Lebanese politician and journalist Gibran Tueni had taken refuge in France, worried that he would be assassinated in his homeland.
On Sunday night, Tueni flew back to Lebanon to attend a government ceremony honoring his father later this week. Yesterday morning, as he drove to his office, Tueni was killed by a massive car bombing.
His allies quickly blamed the killing on Syria, which was the most frequent target of Tueni's searing editorials in An-Nahar, Lebanon's leading newspaper, which continued while he had left the country. Tueni, 48, was its publisher and was elected to parliament in June on an anti-Syrian slate.
Tueni's death came hours before the United Nations released a follow-up report on the investigation into the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The report said new evidence backs investigators' earlier conclusion that Lebanese and Syrian security officials plotted Hariri's killing. It also accused Syria of trying to obstruct the investigation.
"Tueni and An-Nahar were being threatened for a long time by the Syrian regime," said Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, an ally of Tueni's. "They killed Gibran Tueni today to send a message to the international community, and to everyone in Lebanon."
Syrian officials denied involvement in Tueni's killing, as they have done in at least 10 other bombings since Hariri's assassination. "Those who are behind this are the enemies of Lebanon," Syrian Information Minister Mehdi Dakhlallah told Lebanese TV.
Despite Syria's denials, U.S. and French officials said they would continue to pressure Damascus to cooperate with the UN probe into Hariri's killing. "Syrian interference in Lebanon continues, and it must end completely," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Washington.
As word of Tueni's death spread through the streets of Beirut, churches rang their bells and hundreds of people gathered outside An-Nahar's downtown offices, near the site of popular protests that followed Hariri's killing. Weeping demonstrators waved posters of Tueni and Samir Kassir, a columnist for An-Nahar who was killed in June by a car bombing that also was widely blamed on Syria.
A previously unknown group calling itself "The Strugglers for Unity and Freedom in the Levant" claimed responsibility for Tueni's killing in a statement faxed to news organizations. "We have broken the pen of Gibran Tueni and gagged his mouth forever, turning An-Nahar into a dark night," it said. (An-Nahar means "the day" in Arabic.)
The statement's authenticity could not be independently verified. Many Lebanese noted that, shortly after Hariri's assassination, news organizations received statements of responsibility from a group that later turned out to be nonexistent.
Hariri's killing prompted international pressure and protests that led to the resignation of Syrian-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami and to the withdrawal of Syrian troops. Syria had kept thousands of troops in Lebanon since 1976, a year after the start of a civil war. When the war ended in 1990, the troops remained and Syria's influence extended through Lebanon's political and economic life.
The initial UN findings on Hariri's killing, released Oct. 20, said the decision to assassinate Hariri "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services."
One version of that report named Syrian President Bashar Assad's brother and brother-in-law as among five Syrian officials who plotted Hariri's killing. But the chief UN investigator, Detlev Mehlis, expunged the names from the report hours before it was released, saying they were meant for the UN Security Council's eyes only. The men have all denied involvement in the plot, and were not detained.
Yesterday's report by Mehlis said Syria was moving at a "slow pace" in meeting Security Council demands for cooperation with UN investigators. The document also cited evidence that Syrian authorities had arrested and threatened relatives of one key witness, a former Syrian intelligence operative, shortly before he recanted testimony last month that was central to Mehlis' earlier findings.
Before his death, Tueni repeatedly blamed Syria for Hariri's killing and a series of bombings that followed. "We're seeing a scorched-earth policy," he told Newsday in March, after multiple bombings rocked Beirut over a 10-day period. "The Syrians don't want to leave Lebanon without destroying it."
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