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Third former militiaman with links to Sabra and
Chatila is murdered
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
11 March 2002
The secrets of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian camp
massacres in 1982 have gone to the grave with yet
another former Phalangist militiaman, the third
Lebanese to die mysteriously in little more than two
months.
Michael Nassar, who was a former associate of Elie
Hobeika – the Phalangist leader murdered in a car
bombing in Beirut in January – was shot dead in Brazil
by a man firing a pistol equipped with a silencer. His
young wife, Marie, was shot down beside him.
A Belgian court has postponed a decision over whether
to indict Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister,
for his role in the massacres – he was held
"personally responsible" by an Israeli commission of
inquiry – while lawyers for the survivors produce more
evidence. But the vital evidence that may lie in the
memories of those involved with the killers, who were
allied to Israel at the time, is disappearing almost
by the week as the death list grows.
Nassar grew immensely wealthy from the Lebanese civil
war, selling former Phalangist weapons to Croatian
militias during the Balkan conflict. One of his ships
ended up in the hands of the Serb navy, which sent
Nassar a warehouse bill after the guns were impounded.
He fled Beirut in 1997 after a Lebanese court demanded
he explain his wealth, put at £70m .
Nassar was apparently already worried when he pulled
his car into a petrol station in the suburbs of Sao
Paolo on Friday; he had used his mobile phone to tell
a friend that he was being followed by men in a car.
He made a second call – telling his friend that his
pursuers seemed to have vanished – just before the
gunman fired five bullets into his body and another
seven into his wife.
Israel has denied that Hobeika, who had agreed to
testify against Mr Sharon less than 24 hours before he
was killed, was murdered by its own death squads. The
Lebanese authorities say the opposite. Nassar – a
nephew of the former general Antoine Lahd who
commanded Israel's one-time proxy, the "south Lebanon
army militia" – might have been the victim of a
Brazilian mafia killing. Certainly, robbery was not
the motive.
The first former right-wing Christian to be struck
down was one of Hobeika's old colleagues, Jean Ghanem,
who drove his car into a tree on New Year's Day. He
died after being in a coma for two weeks. Then came
Hobeika's murder and now Nassar's. Other former
Phalangists live in fear of their lives, either from
Israel or from Palestinians seeking revenge for the
1982 massacre in which up to 1,700 Palestinian
civilians were slaughtered.
One of them recently said that dozens of Palestinians
who survived the massacres were executed at a former
barracks near Jounieh, north of the capital, after
being held in containers for two weeks. The prisoners
had been handed over to the Phalangists, he said, by
Israeli troops at the ruined sports stadium in Beirut.
The location of their mass grave is known to the
British daily The Independent.
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Forwarded by
La Voz de Aztlan
http://www.aztlan.net
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