Anti-Syria Publisher Is Killed in Lebanon

A newspaper publisher and politician who had been one of the most outspoken critics of Syrian interference in Lebanon was assassinated Monday by a car bomb as he drove through the hills of Beirut.

Gibran Tueni, a third-generation newspaperman and newly elected lawmaker, had returned to Lebanon the previous day from France, where he had taken refuge over the summer, saying his name was at the top of an assassination list in Lebanon.

The charismatic Tueni was the most prominent Lebanese figure slain since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in February. Hours after Tueni’s death, the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the attack and an investigation into the killing of Hariri. A United Nations investigator said fresh evidence bolstered his earlier conclusion that senior Syrian and Lebanese officials were involved in Hariri’s death.

The truck bomb that killed Hariri along with 22 other people, as well as more than a dozen bombings that struck Lebanon after his death, have been widely blamed on Syria. At least four politicians and journalists have been slain this year and another nearly killed, each an unflinching critic of Syrian involvement in Lebanon.

The violence has led many Lebanese to the conclusion that the Syrian government in Damascus has embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle criticism through killing.

Top officials in Damascus deny any hand in the violence, but Syria was forced to withdraw its soldiers and intelligence agents from Lebanon in spring amid a groundswell of Lebanese anger and intense international pressure after Hariri’s slaying.

“It’s an open war from the Syrian leadership on these people, and through these people on all of Lebanon,” Chibli Mallat, a prominent Lebanese lawyer, said of the killings. “The future of the Middle East rests on the response of the international community. There must be justice.”

The chief of the United Nations investigation into Hariri’s death, Detlev Mehlis, on Monday accused Damascus of blocking his inquiry and intimidating witnesses. He was scheduled to brief the U.N. Security Council today on his latest findings.

Tueni, a 48-year-old Christian, was killed as his armored sport utility vehicle traveled a road that twists through an industrial patch of factories and printing houses in the pine-shaded hills of East Beirut. The bomb was apparently planted in a parked car.

Workers in the area said it was well known that Tueni generally drove into town from his suburban home along that road, which wraps precariously around the edge of a steep cliff.

The blast was so strong it blew out factory windows for blocks around. Tueni’s vehicle burst into flames and was thrown into the ravine.

Hours after the explosion, small fires still smoldered where bits of wreckage had landed in the dying grasses. Factory workers stood dazed in the quiet streets, the layers of broken glass crunching under their feet. Other cars charred by the blast were scattered like abandoned toys on the empty road.

“I don’t have any doubt that [Syrian President] Bashar al Assad and his band of organized criminals are behind this,” Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh told reporters after crossing police lines to inspect the bomb site. Hamadeh, Tueni’s uncle, is a critic of Syria who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by car bomb last year.

At least two other people were killed in Monday’s blast, one of whom was identified as Tueni’s bodyguard. Witnesses said the corpses were blackened beyond recognition. About 30 other people were wounded.

“We ran down the hill, and the cars were completely burned, like charcoal,” said Wissam Sassin, who was working at a nearby furniture factory when the explosion shook the neighborhood. “Nobody was out of the cars. What I saw was indescribable.”

As word of Tueni’s death spread through Beirut, the streets of the capital grew somber. A sense of despair and disorder pervaded the city as politicians placed the blame for the assassination squarely on Damascus.

Mourners gathered outside the sleek, modern offices of An Nahar, the Tueni family’s newspaper, set alongside the sea where the heaviest fighting of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war once raged.

Inside the newsroom, reporters stood in quiet circles near their cubicles, weeping into tissues and leaning on one another’s shoulders. Some had at their desks pictures of popular columnist Samir Kassir, another staunch Syria critic who was killed June 2 by a car bomb.

Although Syria has withdrawn the intelligence and military forces that exercised overt control in Lebanon, the newly independent Lebanese government has found itself unable to prevent or investigate the slayings of prominent journalists and politicians. Frustration is growing among politicians, many of whom have either taken refuge overseas or swathed themselves in security guards and armored cars.

“The purpose is to say to all of us, ‘Shut up, don’t say anything.’ They’re succeeding in killing, but they’re not succeeding in making us quiet,” said legislator Nabil Freij, who stood somberly among mourners in the newsroom of An Nahar. “We feel unsafe, all of us.”

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that although it was unclear who committed the bombing, it was “another act of terrorism aimed at trying to subjugate Lebanon to Syrian domination.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared: “Syrian interference in Lebanon continues, and it must end completely.”

Tueni’s assassination strengthened calls for two long-standing demands of anti-Syria lawmakers: the ouster of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and the establishment of an international tribunal to try those behind the killings in Lebanon.

Lahoud is a staunch ally of Damascus and is widely seen as a lingering symbol of Syrian domination. Syrian officials were so keen to keep him in power that they strong-armed the Lebanese parliament to amend the constitution last year to extend his mandate.

It was that act of blatant political tampering that fueled Hariri’s falling out with Damascus and is viewed as the key precursor to the political upheaval that followed.

As for an international tribunal, many Lebanese view it as the only way to achieve justice in the series of killings. This country is still stunted from 15 years of civil war followed by 15 years of notoriously corrupt and Syrian-controlled governance. Many here believe the judicial and investigative authorities are too weak to manage an effective inquiry into the assassinations.

Shiite Muslim legislators, historically backed by Syria, have balked at the suggestion of a tribunal. On Monday, many Lebanese called for sectarian unity, hoping that Hezbollah and other Shiite parties felt sufficiently pressured by Tueni’s killing to drop their resistance.

“Hezbollah knows what it should do, especially when it comes to the international tribunal,” lawmaker Farid Khazen said. “We’ve been moving from one assassination to the other, and this can’t continue.”

But when the Cabinet voted late Monday to call for an international investigation into the killings, five Shiite ministers suspended their participation in the government in protest.

As the publisher of one of Lebanon’s most respected newspapers, Tueni had long been critical of Syrian interference in Lebanon. He was at the forefront of massive street protests that choked the streets of Beirut after Hariri’s assassination, his neck draped in the red and white of the Lebanese flag.

When Lebanon held its first parliamentary elections since the withdrawal of Syrian soldiers, Tueni was elected as part of the bloc headed by Saad Hariri, the slain former prime minister’s son and political heir. After the elections in late spring, Tueni continued to run the newspaper from Paris, and kept penning scathing editorials.

“When will this despotic regime come to its senses?” he wrote of Syria in a recent opinion piece.

“All the Syrian talk about their will to help Lebanon and open a new page in their relations with our country is nonsense,” he wrote in another recent article. “Syria is afraid of the truth because it would expose its bad practices in Lebanon and point the finger of accusation at it.... What a peace force that kidnaps, imprisons, tortures, kills and throws innocent victims in mass graves.”

Tueni was the father of four daughters; his wife recently gave birth to twin girls.

A previously unknown group calling itself “Strugglers for the Unity and Freedom of the Levant” faxed a claim of responsibility for Tueni’s death to Reuters on Monday afternoon. It was unclear who sent the fax, and the claim could not be confirmed.

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Times staff writers Maggie Farley at the United Nations and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.