The killing of a top army officer in Lebanon is a clear message aimed at terrorizing the country's military chief who has been tipped to become president, the country's newspapers said yesterday.
The murder of Brigadier General Francois Hajj by a car bomb on Wednesday was intended "to terrorize the army and the consensus candidate," the leading An-Nahar daily said in its headline.
It was referring to General Michel Sleiman, the frontrunner to fill the vacant presidency but whose election has been blocked by a standoff between pro- and anti-Syrian camps.
Hajj, whose bodyguard was also killed, had been tipped to replace Sleiman as army chief if he became president.
"Hajj assassination: the bloody road to Baabda," said the headline in the opposition daily Al-Akhbar, referring to the suburb where the presidential palace is located and where the general was killed on his way to work.
The independent dayly Al-Anwar said that for the first time the army had become the target of an assassination "to make it understand that it was now embroiled in the country's political conflict."
"The other message was directed at the army chief to tell him to stop thinking of the presidency," the paper said.
Before Hajj was killed the army had remained on the sidelines of the crisis pitting the pro-Western ruling majority against the Hezbollah-led opposition, and was seen as the only solid and unifying institution in the country.
message
The French daily L'Orient-Le-Jour said Wednesday's car bombing was "a registered letter" to Sleiman as he aspires to the presidency and also a message to the Lebanese people.
"The unrelenting and terribly efficient death machine once again wanted to prove its presence and that it could act with complete impunity despite international pressure," the daily said.
Meanwhile the UN Security Council and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned Hajj's assassination calling it an attempt to destabilize the armed forces.
In separate statements on Wednesday, the UN's most powerful body and its chief executive said the killing was an attempt to undermine Lebanon's sovereignty and demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice.
They also called for presidential elections to be held without delay.
The Lebanese president's office has been vacant since Nov. 23, when Emile Lahoud's term ended.
The Security Council condemned the killing of Hajj "in the strongest terms" and strongly condemned the attempt "to destabilize Lebanese institutions, in this particular case the Lebanese Armed Forces." The council reiterated its condemnation of all targeted assassinations in Lebanon.
Ban, the UN chief, "was outraged" at the attack and "strongly condemns this act of violence and terror on the Lebanese Armed Forces, a symbol of Lebanon's sovereignty," UN deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.
"The secretary-general calls on the Lebanese for calm and restraint at this critical juncture in their history," Okabe said. "Their political leaders must exert every possible effort to resolve differences and arrive at a solution for an immediate presidential election, without conditionality, in accordance with constitutional rules."
free and fair
The Security Council underlined "that no attempt to destabilize Lebanon should prevent the holding, without delay, of a free and fair presidential election in conformity with Lebanese constitutional rules, without any foreign interference or influence, and with full respect for democratic institutions."
It backed Ban's efforts to establish a special tribunal for Lebanon "in a timely manner, as a means to put an end to impunity in Lebanon and deter further assassinations."
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