BEIRUT: Lebanese leaders have urged for calm after the country’s first political assassination in months threatened efforts to reconcile its divided factions. The killing of Druze leader Saleh Aridi, a senior member of the Lebanese Democratic Party, came less than a week before planned reconciliation talks among rival Lebanese factions.
It was the first such assassination since an Arab-brokered agreement was reached after sectarian fighting in May. That agreement led to the election of a new president and the formation of a national unity Cabinet.
Aridi died late Wednesday in his village of Baissour in the Druze-populated hills east of Beirut, after a bomb planted under his car was detonated by remote control as he drove away from his home, police said.
The attack was thought by politicians to be an effort to rekindle violence between rivals in the sensitive Druze-inhabited mountains, areas controlled by the two main Druze factions - the Lebanese Democratic Party led by Talal Arslan and the Progressive Socialist Party of Walid Jumblatt.
