LF Lashes at Karami's Stance on Geagea's Release

The Lebanese Forces expressed disenchantment with ex-Premier Omar Karami's proposal that a national referendum be held to decide whether jailed LF commander Samir Geagea should be freed, while stressing at the same time that he would not drop his court right as a plaintiff against the imprisoned leader.
"We are quite bewildered by ex-Premier Karami's contradictory positions, especially that he and Samir Geagea were members of the same Lebanese government," said an LF statement carried by An Nahar on Saturday.

Geagea was a cabinet member of Omar Karami's government in 1991. The Statement said Karami had then declared that he had surmounted the sensitivities involving the assassination of his brother, the late Prime Minister Rashid Karami."

Geagea was convicted by a Beirut court after his 1994 arrest of masterminding Rashid Karami's mid-air assassination as he was flying back to Beirut from Tripoli on an army helicopter on June 1, 1987.

Geagea's death sentence in Karami's case was commuted to life imprisonment. So were three other capital punishment verdicts, which left the LF commander languishing in solitary confinement in an underground defense ministry cell for the past nine years.

The new LF statement noted that Omar Karami's assertion that he won't forgo as plaintiff right was a sharp contradiction with the proposed referendum, "which the LF is not going to enter into arguments about it."

However, the statement reminded Karami that the LF had scored handsomely in Lebanon's latest municipal elections "despite the incarceration of its leader and the persecution of its activists," while the ex-premier finished a poor last among the winners in Lebanon's 2000 parliamentary elections at his hometown of Tripoli.

Beirut, Updated 10 Aug 03, 14:30