Youssef Diab
Lebanon’s judiciary sentenced five brothers from the Shamas family to death in abstentia Friday over the 2007 murders of Ziad Qabalan and child Ziad Ghandour.
Another three people in custody were sentenced to jail terms ranging from two to 10 years over involvement in the killings.
The Judicial Council handed down the sentences to five siblings from the Shamas family called Mohammad, Shehadeh, Abdallah, Abbas and Ali, who were charged with kidnapping and murdering the two victims.
The council published a full story about the crime, saying it was organized by the five brothers in retaliation for the murder of Adnan Shamas, a relative of the convicts, during clashes at Beirut Arab University earlier that year.
Shamas was killed in the brief clashes that erupted at BAU and its surroundings on Jan. 25, 2007, which took on a sectarian nature.
The Shamas family, according to the judiciary, believed that Ghandour’s father, Mounir, and Qabalan both had a role in their relative’s death, and refused to recognize the charges against Syrian man Ragheb Ibrahim, who allegedly confessed to have committed the crime.
The Shamas brothers were convicted of carrying out the killings on April 24, 2007, when one of them used a fake name and asked Qabalan, 25, to meet him behind Hayat Hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the judiciary said.
There, the five men ambushed and surrounded Qabalan’s Renault car as soon as he arrived. The 12-year-old Ghandour, son of Mounir, was also in the car. They were both handcuffed, their mouths were covered and they were driven south in a black Mercedes E300 with tinted windows and without license plates.
In the Chouf village of Jadra, two of the gunmen, Ali and Mohammad Shamas, shot Qabalan and the boy with silenced guns and threw their bodies in a field, as the other siblings watched the road, the judiciary said.
The Lebanese convict Wissam al-Arabi was sentenced to 10 years for using his contacts in Wata al-Mousaytbeh to help the criminals reach their victims.
Mustapha al-Saidi and Ayman Safwan were sentenced to two years over helping Shehadeh Shamas escape to the Mousharrafieh area after the crime.
The crime, which sparked a wave of anger among the residents of Wata al-Mousaytbeh and threatened to ignite a sectarian conflict in Beirut, was neither judged as a “terrorist attack” nor as an “assault on Lebanon’s internal security.”
The council said that “although the crime was committed in a climate of sectarian and political tension, the motives behind it was revenge, which was out of a repugnant individual clannish mentality that remains present in many areas of Lebanon.”
No financial compensations were judged for the families of Ghandour and Qabalan, because their lawyers abstained from submitting the individual demands, the decision said.
All five main convicts remain on the run, while the other three were incarcerated.
It has been more than a decade since Lebanon last implemented the death penalty.
No comments:
Post a Comment