Syrian Interior Minister Leaves Beirut after One-Week Medical Treatment
Syrian Interior Minister Mohammed al-Shaar on Wednesday left for Damascus via the Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport aboard a private jet, after spending one week at the American University of Beirut Medical Center for treatment of wounds he sustained in a suicide bomb attack on the interior ministry, Lebanon's National News Agency reported.
“Shaar left hospital on Wednesday afternoon,” Turkey's state-run Anatolia news agency quoted medical sources at AUBMC as saying.
It was not clear if Shaar's treatment was completed or if he left because of political pressure.
Shaar was wounded in a deadly attack on December 12 on the Syrian interior ministry in Damascus. The attack was claimed the next day by the jihadist al-Nusra Front.
"His condition is stable and he was able to talk to the people who received him at the airport," a Lebanese minister told Agence France Presse last Wednesday.
According to a security source, Shaar was lightly wounded on the shoulder when his office ceiling collapsed.
Shaar also escaped another deadly attack on July 18, when four top regime officials were killed in Damascus, among them President Bashar Assad's brother-in-law Assef Shawkat.
A Lebanese lawyer said he filed a lawsuit on Monday against Shaar, accusing him of having ordered hundreds of killings in the northern city of Tripoli in 1986.
Shortly after he arrived in Beirut for treatment last week, anti-Syrian politicians, including legislators Jamal al-Jarrah and Mohammed Kabbara, called for Shaar's arrest.
The case filed by lawyer Tareq Shandab accuses Shaar, who in 1986 was in charge of security in Tripoli, of "genocide, ethnic cleansing, political assassination and the killing of religious officials and children in Bab al-Tabbaneh, Tripoli, in 1986."
It alleges that Shaar and his aides along with "criminal" Lebanese accomplices on December 19, 1986 "killed and slaughtered more than 600 people from the Tabbaneh district."
At the time, Lebanon was immersed in a bloody civil war that broke out in 1975 and left some 150,000 people dead over 15 years.
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