Hours later a court ordered Mr Bitar to halt his work pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by Mr Khalil and a colleague. On October 12th he issued an arrest warrant for Ali Hassan Khalil, a former finance minister from Amal, after the latter failed to turn up for questioning. He has summoned high-ranking officials, including a former prime minister and cabinet members. Mr Bitar, by most accounts, takes his job seriously. Since then politicians, security officials and intellectuals have been assassinated, with few consequences for their killers. An amnesty law passed in 1991 meant that almost no one was held accountable for atrocities during the 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990. It would be more accurate to call this a protest against the investigation itself: a rally for impunity, of which Lebanon has a long history. Pressed for evidence of a foreign conspiracy, supporters of Hizbullah and Amal offer little beyond the fact that some American congressmen have praised Mr Bitar. He has won support from families of the 218 people killed in the explosion. The investigator, Tarek al-Bitar, is a judge with a clean reputation. His allies mumble darkly about an American-backed conspiracy. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, says the lead investigator is biased. Ostensibly the protest was about the “politicisation” of the probe. His party denies it was involved (there is no evidence yet to prove it was). Hizbullah and Amal, which are both militias as well as political parties, blamed this “ambush” on the Lebanese Forces, a Christian party led by Samir Geagea, a warlord-turned-politician. Soon after the rally began, snipers fired into its midst from a nearby building. It centred on a rally organised by the two main Shia parties, Hizbullah and Amal, to protest against the investigation into last year’s catastrophic explosion at Beirut’s port. The guns fell silent after a few hours, but the streets were left carpeted with broken glass, the buildings pockmarked with bullet holes.Īt least seven people were killed and dozens injured in the worst violence in Lebanon’s capital since 2008. Residents cowered in hallways and bathrooms. Frantic parents searched for safe routes to collect children from school. Gunmen crouched behind cars and fired wildly at apartment blocks or rushed out from cover to launch rocket-propelled grenades. FOR MANY Lebanese, the scenes in Beirut on October 14th harked back to their country’s darkest days.
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