BEIRUT/GAZA, 25 January — Elie Hobeika, the man behind the massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982, was killed in a car bomb blast with three bodyguards in the Beirut suburb of Hazmiyeh yesterday. Lebanon and the Palestinians accused Israel of assassinating Hobeika, 46, to eliminate a potential witness against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who may be tried in a Belgian court for the camps’ massacres.
A Belgian senator who saw Hobeika in Lebanon on Tuesday said the former warlord had claimed to have "new evidence" about the massacres and wanted to testify in any Sharon trial. Hobeika also felt "threatened," Sen. Josy Dubie said. Israel dismissed the allegations as "rubbish".
A Mercedes blew up as Hobeika’s own car, a Range Rover, passed by only a few hundred meters from his home in the Christian eastern suburb at 9:30 a.m. (0730 GMT), security sources said. The blast was so violent that Hobeika’s body was thrown 50 meters from the vehicle, and the body of one bodyguard ended up on a second floor balcony. A four-story building was also set on fire and six of its residents were taken to hospital, one in serious condition.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud implicitly accused Israel of being behind the assassination "to prevent the deceased from testifying before the court in Belgium." Interior Minister Elias Murr said "Israel and its agents are behind this terrorist act. Undoubtedly, it was (an operation) against him personally and undoubtedly (it carried) messages addressed to Lebanon and the Arab world."
Murr was speaking after an emergency meeting of the Central Security Council, which groups the heads of all security bodies, and which was attended by Brig. Rustom Ghazali, representing Syrian troops deployed in Lebanon.
Between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian refugees died at the hands of Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut the day after Israeli troops entered the capital in 1982, when Sharon was defense minister. Hobeika was intelligence chief of the Lebanese Forces militia, which carried out the massacres.
An Israeli inquiry committee pinned indirect responsibility for the massacres on Sharon, while blaming Hobeika directly for the killings.
Sultan Abul Aynain, the representative in Lebanon of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, said the "Mossad (Israeli intelligence service) assassinated Hobeika to prevent him from testifying against Sharon.
In the Gaza Strip and West Bank, four Palestinians, including a Hamas activist, were killed. Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at a Palestinian car in the southern Gaza Strip, assassinating the Hamas activist late at night.
