Crisis-hit Lebanon on edge

Lebanon buried the victims of its deadliest sectarian unrest in years yesterday after gunfire gripped central Beirut for hours and revived the ghosts of the civil war.

Seven people were killed and dozens wounded Thursday when violence erupted following a rally by Shiite protesters demanding the removal of the judge investigating last year's devastating Beirut port blast.

The Shia movements Amal and Hezbollah that organised the protest in front the Justice Palace accused the Lebanese Forces (LF) Christian party of engineering the chaos by aiming sniper fire at the demonstrators.

The front page of the Al-Akhbar daily, which is close to Hezbollah, carried a portrait of LF leader Samir Geagea donning Adolf Hitler's uniform and toothbrush moustache with a headline that read "No doubt".

"Samir Geagea, you were the first to know what happened yesterday... because you planned, prepared and executed... a major crime," the newspaper wrote.

The LF strenuously denied any involvement in Thursday's flare-up and said Hezbollah was "invading" off-limits neighbourhoods when the violence broke out.

A heavy army presence was visible on the streets Friday amid fears of an escalation.

On Thursday, Amal and Hezbollah militiamen in their hundreds filled the streets around Tayouneh, a notorious civil war flashpoint near the spot where the April 1975 bus attack often presented as the trigger of the conflict occurred.

As a deluge of bullets riddled residential facades, and gaggles of fighters wearing ammunition vests took over the streets and emptied their magazines haphazardly, civilians crouched in homes, terrified.

France, the United States, Russia  and United Nations appealed for a de-escalation but also insisted on the need to allow the port explosion probe to continue unhindered.

In addition to long-standing animosity between the LF and the Shiite groups, their feud was renewed by the fate of Tarek Bitar, the judge who has led the investigation into the August 4, 2020 port explosion.

What was one of the world's biggest ever non-nuclear explosions and Lebanon's worst peacetime disaster killed 215 people, wounded thousands and flattened swathes of the capital.

The investigation has not yet established who was responsible for the tonnes of ammonium nitrate which had been poorly stored at the port for years nor what exactly started the fire that detonated the fertiliser.

Hezbollah and Amal accuse Bitar of political bias in an investigation which Lebanon's ruling elite as a whole has hampered at every turn for more than a year.