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/ 21 October 2005
Lebanon’s pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud faced renewed calls to resign on Friday after a United Nations report implicated Syrian and Lebanese security services in the murder of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The killing triggered an international outcry and led many in Lebanon to point the finger at Syria.
Lebanon’s outgoing Defence Minister Elias Murr was wounded on Tuesday morning in an explosion in a Christian suburb just north of the capital Beirut that also caused fatalities, the police said. Murr, the son-in-law of President Emile Lahoud and deputy prime minister, was taken to Serhal hospital, where an employee said his condition was ”good”.
Prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was assassinated on Thursday when his car blew up in a residential sector of mostly Christian east Beirut in an attack that drew widespread condemnation. Lebanese opposition figures blamed the blast on the government and its political masters in Syria.
”In countries like ours, women enter politics in mourning clothes.” Christian opposition MP Nayla Moawad, who made the comment, is one of a few women running for a seat in Lebanon’s male-dominated Parliament. She was propelled on to the tribal political scene by the 1989 murder of her husband, president Rene Moawad.
Syrian soldiers hauling missiles and radar equipment headed home on Tuesday ahead of their country’s planned military withdrawal from Lebanon by the end of the month. A United Nations envoy met Lebanese officials to monitor the progress of the pullout.
A car bomb wrecked the front of a building in a predominantly Christian suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, early on Saturday, wounding nine people, hospital officials said. The motive and target of the bombing were not immediately clear. A local legislator called it an act of terrorism that could be an attempt to destabilise the country.
The once-feared Syrian intelligence agents vanished from Beirut and large parts of Lebanon on Wednesday, but not before repainting the jail in the basement of their headquarters. Almost all their intelligence offices in north Lebanon and the mountains east of Beirut were abandoned, and 150 to 200 agents moved to the eastern Beka’a valley.
Syria’s supporters in Lebanon struck back against the ”cedar revolution” this week with a show of strength that easily dwarfed anything their opponents have been able to muster. They drove into Beirut in cars, waving Lebanese flags, and in battered buses decorated with pictures of the Syrian-backed President, Emile Lahoud.
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/ 25 February 2005
A United Nations team vowed on Friday to be impartial in probing in Lebanon the murder of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, as Lebanon waited for powerful neighbour Syria to begin a promised troop redeployment. Damascus is under international pressure and from Lebanon’s opposition to withdraw from its smaller neighbour.
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/ 18 February 2005
Lebanon was hunting on Friday for six suspects over the killing of former premier Rafiq Hariri as the Syrian-backed regime faced escalating calls to stand down and Washington issued more stark warnings to Damascus. Hariri’s murder in a bomb blast on Monday sent shockwaves through the country and added to tensions with its political masters in Syria.
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/ 16 February 2005
Screaming and weeping mourners clambered around the coffin carrying the Lebanese flag-draped body of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri as hundreds of thousands of people attended an emotion-charged funeral service on Wednesday at a mosque, two days after Hariri was killed by a huge bomb.
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/ 14 February 2005
Former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, killed in a massive blast in Beirut on Monday, was a self-made billionaire who led his country’s reconstruction efforts after the devastating 1975 to 1990 civil war. Long regarded as the great political survivor, Hariri headed five governments before finally stepping down in October last year.
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/ 14 February 2005
Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri was killed in a huge explosion in central Beirut on Monday. The massive bomb targeted Hariri’s motorcade along this city’s famed seafront boulevard, also killing at least nine other people and injuring at least 100. The explosion set ablaze cars and devastated buildings.
Israeli warplanes raided a suspected guerrilla hideout in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, shortly after Hezbollah gunners fired on Israeli jets that violated Lebanese airspace, security officials said. The Lebanese officials said two Israeli fighter jets fired at least one missile at a valley near the village of Zibqine.
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/ 5 November 2003
Syria has called on the United States to pull its troops out of Iraq, saying their presence has led to chaos and terrorism. ”When America entered Iraq, there was no terrorism problem. Now, there is the problem of terrorism and of al-Qaeda,” Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Bushra Kanafani said on Wednesday.
Monday night’s al-Qaeda-style attack may not have come as a great surprise
to moderate Saudi Islamists familiar with the thinking of the extremists in their midst.
The radical Shiite Muslim Hezbollah militia group denied it had planned to bomb US and Israeli ships in Singapore five years ago.