BEIRUT, 28 April 2007 — Several thousand people bid farewell yesterday to a man and a 12-year-old boy whose murder shocked Lebanon and caused rival political leaders to reach out to each other to stop the country from reverting to the sectarian bloodshed of its past.
Police said they were looking for at least three suspects in connection with the killing of Ziad Ghandour, 12, and his neighbor Ziad Qabalan, 25, whose bloated, bullet-riddled bodies were found on the side of a road near the southern port of Sidon late Thursday — four days after they disappeared in Beirut.
The government closed schools and universities yesterday, and put troops on alert and canceled military leave.
“The crimes of the two Ziads shocks Lebanon,” the As-Safir newspaper shouted in its front-page headline. “Lebanon unites around the blood of the two martyrs,” said the front page of Al-Balad newspaper.
Ambulances delivered the bodies of Ghandour and Qabalan to their families in the Beirut district of Wata Al-Mseitbeh, where their coffins were carried by neighbors and friends amid a throng of hundreds of mourners to a local mosque.
Druze political leader Walid Jumblatt led the mourners at the mosque, accompanied by Cabinet ministers, lawmakers and Sunni and Shiite clergymen. “We consider Ziad and Ziad as martyrs for national unity,” Jumblatt told the congregation. “Let’s keep this incident away from politics, let the judicial process take its course and stop the malicious rumor-mongering.”
Jumblatt even thanked his arch political rivals, the Shiite opposition party Hezbollah, for its condemnation of the killings and said: “We are united by a struggle and the resistance (to Israel).”
