 Lebanon vowed Monday to confront the wave of attacks against anti-Syrian figures after a top woman television anchor was targeted in a car bombing, adding to a climate of fear in the country. May Shidyaq, 40, a Christian news presenter and political talk show host on LBC television, was maimed when a bomb planted in her car blew up on the northern outskirts of Beirut on Sunday. It was the 13th in a wave of bombings unleashed in February, when Lebanon's billionaire former prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in a huge bomb blast on the Beirut seafront. "It is a terrorist plot ... and the state is doing everything it can" to tackle the attacks, Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh told reporters after Prime Minister Fuad Siniora met with security chiefs.
| Maybe they should try hiring some German investigators to hunt them down? The Lebs don't seem to be up to the job. |
"I have drawn up together with the defence minister a plan to exchange information among the different security services to foil terrorist acts at the stage of preparation," he said. But the interior minister warned: "We should expect more attacks like this."
| That means they're not going to hire any German investigators. Pity. |
Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh, who himself survived an assassination bid a year ago, pointed the finger of blame at Syria, Lebanon's intelligence services and its pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud. "It was the same people as the ones who tried to kill me," the Druze minister said, accusing "Damascus, Baabda (site of the presidential palace) and the intelligence services."
| Y'think? Saaaaaay! Maybe that's why they haven't caught them... |
The unsolved attacks have instilled fear among many critics of former power-broker Syria, with a number of anti-Damascus figures such as Hariri's MP son Saad Hariri spending much of their time out of the country. "These attacks are aimed at terrorising the Lebanese while the inquiry into the murder of Rafiq Hariri is going on," Siniora said on Sunday after visiting Shidyaq in hospital. |