Man to Serve 4 Years in U.S. Envoy’s Slaying
A Lebanese Muslim was sentenced to four years of hard labor Thursday for complicity in the 1976 kidnaping and murders of U.S. Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, an embassy counselor and their Lebanese driver.
Nameq Ahmed Kamel hid in Meloy’s car after guerrillas of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine snatched the victims at a checkpoint in West Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war.
The bodies of Meloy, economic counselor Robert O. Waring and their driver, Mohammed Moghrabi, were found hours later in another district of West Beirut.
The suspected killer, an agent of the Palestinian group who uses the name Mahmoud Awadah, remains at large.
The court cited a lack of evidence in handing down Kamel’s relatively light sentence. It acquitted another man accused in the case.
The two defendants had earlier been convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. They later turned up and, under Lebanese law, a new trial was ordered.
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