MIDEAST : Long a Haven for the Lawless, Beirut Declares War on Crime

Naeb Maaytah was pulling out of a parking lot near his Beirut home one morning late last month, en route to work at the nearby Jordanian Embassy, when a young man approached his car.

He said nothing to Maaytah, 43, Jordan’s second-ranking diplomat in the Lebanese capital. He simply leveled a pistol, fired seven times into Maaytah’s head and neck and walked casually away.

It was murder as usual in war-weary Beirut, a city long synonymous with terror, assassination and anarchy. But in the weeks since Maaytah was gunned down like thousands of other victims of political killings during Beirut’s decades of turmoil, something extraordinary has happened: Lebanese police actually arrested a suspect in the case, along with a gang of alleged accomplices.

A young Palestinian, Youssef Mahmoud Shaaban, was identified by Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces as the suspected gunman.

The arrests were the first in such a case since Lebanon’s 15-year civil war erupted in 1975, leaving much of its capital a lawless ruin and a world headquarters for international terrorists.

They resulted from one of the most intensive investigations in the nation’s history, directed by the brigadier general who heads Lebanon’s judicial police and spurred on by almost daily personal inquiries from Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

If that weren’t enough to show that times are changing in Beirut, police also picked up five additional suspects in the case Thursday. In coming weeks, Lebanese prosecutors say, officials hope to set yet another precedent: to try to convict the suspects on murder charges in a court of law.

Clearly, the case has taken on enormous symbolic importance for the Lebanese government.

The rapid and efficient police work in the case has become a new centerpiece of Hariri’s crusade to prove to his neighbors, to America and to the West that a new age of law and order has dawned.

The Jan. 29 assassination threatened to sidetrack Hariri’s campaign to re-establish international respectability for a land desperate for outside aid and investment. Throughout the last year, relative calm and economic growth rates of about 7% had led to the reopening of such key foreign missions as the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

“Confidence had begun to return, and the Lebanese had begun to revel in it, boast about it,” Ghassan Tueni, a former Cabinet minister and diplomat, wrote in Beirut’s leading Arabic daily newspaper, An Nahar. “Has confidence now melted in the furnace of fiery statements about wars that refuse to end?”

Prominent Lebanese analysts say the tough police work and the arrests in the Maaytah case were not merely a product of Hariri’s resolve to quell such fears. Most saw it in a broader regional context, as a sign of a potentially even more significant change in attitude on the part of Syria.

With 25,000 troops on Lebanese soil, Syria commands ultimate influence in Beirut.

Hariri conceded that Syrian secret police helped to track down Maaytah’s suspected killers, most of them members of a radical Palestinian faction that Syria has permitted to operate in Lebanon for many years.

“Syria is more responsible about security here because of the peace process,” said An Nahar’s executive editor, Edmond Saab, who linked the investigation directly to Syria’s broader desire for progress in ongoing peace talks with Israel.

For the battle-fatigued Lebanese, other events in the aftermath of the arrests in the Maaytah case seem to confirm that calmer times lie ahead for Beirut.

On Feb. 11, police arrested another suspect in an unrelated case: Ghaleb Hussein Jamal, 38, was charged with running an “academy of terrorism” in a local Palestinian refugee camp, where he allegedly charged $50 per session to teach young radicals how to stage terrorist attacks. And, four days later, the International Pilots Union formally removed Beirut Airport, the site of many a hijacking in the past, from its terrorism-advisory list, citing “improvements in security conditions (for) incoming and outgoing aircraft.”

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Nicosia, Cyprus, and special correspondent Raschka from Beirut.