Syria Critic Slain in Beirut

BEIRUT — A prominent Lebanese journalist known for his unflinching anti-Syria columns was killed Thursday when a bomb planted inside his car exploded near the heart of downtown Beirut.

The assassination of Samir Kassir, a columnist for the daily newspaper An Nahar, unnerved Lebanon just days after a monthlong series of parliamentary elections got underway. The legislative polls have been billed as Lebanon’s first exercise in unfettered voting after 30 years of civil war and Syrian domination.

The slaying was the first attack on a prominent anti-Syria Lebanese figure since the February killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The mass demonstrations that followed Hariri’s death, bolstered by international pressure, forced the Syrian government to remove its soldiers from Lebanon this spring and relinquish all visible political control over Beirut.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for slaying Kassir. But hours after his death, anti-Syria politicians called for the resignation of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. A faithful ally to Syria, Lahoud has managed to cling to his job despite the political earthquake that has rocked Lebanon in recent months.

“The response to this new crime should be ... the resignation of the president as the effective head of the security and intelligence regime,” said a statement released to reporters after the opposition meeting.

Lahoud paid a condolence call to Beirut’s Press Federation, and his spokesman called the attack a “grave incident.” But pressure on Lahoud had already been building. Key leaders such as Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt and Saad Hariri, who has emerged as the political heir to his slain father, had called for the president’s dismissal before the Kassir slaying.

“As long as the serpent’s head is in Baabda, the assassinations will continue,” Jumblatt told Al Arabiya television Thursday. He was referring to Lahoud, whose presidential palace is in the suburb of Baabda.

In the months since a massive bomb killed the elder Hariri in downtown Beirut, smaller explosions have struck the city and its suburbs. At least three people were killed and dozens wounded in those attacks, which generally targeted Christian neighborhoods but occurred at odd hours of the night and early morning when few people were about.

The explosion Thursday brought the violence back into the daylight hours, and into the bustling city center.

Kassir, 45, had just walked out of his home and slipped into his Alfa Romeo when the bomb went off. The blast was probably caused by a remote-control bomb, the interior minister said.

The blast resounded at midmorning through the streets of the relatively wealthy, predominantly Christian neighborhood of Achrafieh.

Shocked Lebanese poured into the surrounding streets as political leaders and journalists clustered around the wrecked car, in which Kassir’s body was slumped over the steering wheel.

“They were fighting over [parliamentary] seats, and look what’s happened!” yelled Mariam Harb, a 32-year-old nurse. “He isn’t even cold yet, and they are out making speeches.”

Politicians who’ve been fighting for the ouster of Syrian soldiers and the defrocking of their Lebanese allies were quick to blame Syria and its local proxies for the journalist’s death.

“The Syrian regime is responsible from head to toe for this horrific terrorist crime,” Gibran Tueni, An Nahar’s general manager, told reporters at the scene. An outspoken anti-Syria critic, Tueni was elected to parliament this week as part of Saad Hariri’s electoral list in Beirut.

“Lebanon’s opposition should promptly close ranks anew to have every Syrian intelligence cell left behind in Lebanon ruthlessly smashed,” he said.

The Syrian government in Damascus gave in under intense pressure that welled up from the international community and the streets of Beirut in the weeks following Hariri’s assassination.

The last of the Syrian soldiers withdrew from Lebanon in April, but trepidation has lingered over the role of undercover Syrian intelligence agents in the country. On Thursday, anti-Syria leaders called on the United Nations to send a mission to verify the withdrawal of Syrian agents.

The United States, the United Nations and the European Union decried Thursday’s attack. So did France, where Kassir held a second citizenship.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the “heinous act.” She blamed it on “someone that’s trying to intimidate the Lebanese people as they move through this electoral cycle.”

Kassir was one of Lebanon’s most prominent thinkers. He was a historian, professor and author, but drew the widest notoriety for his columns in An Nahar.

After his death, his colleagues draped a Lebanese flag over his chair at the imposing seaside steel-and-glass offices of An Nahar, a renowned newspaper owned by the Tueni family. Students from St. Joseph’s University, where Kassir taught, marched in mourning to the newspaper with pens held aloft.

“Samir was one of the very rare journalists writing in Arabic who expressed his opinions openly, especially on taboo subjects like intelligence and security services,” said Michael Young, another prominent Lebanese columnist. “He had courage. He was not intimidated.”

The founder of a small opposition movement called the Democratic Left, Kassir was seen as a driving force in the anti-Syria street protests. In his writings, he favored subtle condemnation to over-the-top rhetoric, sneering at “Syrian patronage” and gently mocking Syrian officials.

His latest columns scolded Damascus for its intransigence in an evolving region but also turned a critical eye to his own country. In a column on Lebanon’s elections, Kassir told readers that street protests and voting wouldn’t be enough to produce a new, independent democracy.

Kassir had written his way into trouble in the past. In 2001, his passport was seized after he wrote columns critical of the Syrian-linked security services. He described being tailed for weeks, and said he believed there had been intent to harm him.

In a recent interview in Beirut, Kassir warned against Syrian interference but sounded an optimistic note.

“The crowd on the opposition side is completely multi-sectarian, it’s completely new in Lebanon,” he said. “Everybody keeps his own specificity, but everybody has agreed to have one flag. There’s a really high tolerance level.”

Having spent much of his career chronicling the bloodshed of the past, Kassir often spoke of better times ahead.

“I am sure the Lebanese deserve a better future,” Kassir told Reason magazine in 2004. “At least, they deserve to find their own way, in accordance with a rich history that cannot be reduced merely to violence.

“Yes, we were a laboratory for violence, but we were also, before that, a laboratory for modernity, and in some ways we still are.”

Times staff writer Stack reported from Cairo and special correspondent Abouzeid from Beirut.