http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=117593
Car crash adds to Lebanese suspicion
of Israeli cover-up
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
01 February 2002
Did Jean Ghanem hold the secrets of the
testimony on the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre that Elie Hobeika planned
to reveal about Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, before Hobeika's
assassination in Beirut last week?
If he did, we shall never know them �
because Mr Ghanem, once Hobeika's political deputy, died only four days
before Hobeika, two weeks after a mysterious car accident in east Beirut.
Mr Ghanem, a medical doctor who became
a Phalangist party official and served under Hobeika's ruthless command,
is rumoured to have held documents that his former boss intended to present
to Belgian lawyers in their attempt to indict Mr Sharon for his involvement
in the massacre in which up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians were killed.
But on New Year's Day, Mr Ghanem, who was only 56 and with no history of
heart problems, drove his car into a tree in the suburb of Hazmieh �
only a few hundred metres from the spot where Hobeika was killed by a car
bomb last week.
Mr Ghanem's wife was badly hurt in the
crash and remains in hospital. He died on 14 January after lying in a coma
for two weeks. Hospital officials said he had had a heart attack. But now
Lebanon's judicial police plan to ask Mrs Ghanem if she wishes to exhume
her husband's body for a second autopsy and Nabih Berri, the Lebanese parliament
speaker, says that the death of Mr Ghanem � who was also second
in command of Hobeika's Al Waad party � may be linked to Hobeika's
murder.
Another of Hobeika's former militia buddies,
Karim Pakradouni, who is now head of the Phalange Party, says the same
thing.
Lebanon blamed Israel for Hobeika's murder
� which Mr Sharon himself denied. An anonymous phone-caller
in Cyprus claimed his killing as the work of a supposedly anti-Syrian group
that no one has ever heard of. Mr Hobeika, who led the Phalangist killers
into Sabra and Chatila, changed sides from Israel to Syria during the civil
war. But Lebanese police have now traced the car in which the bomb was
placed to Jezzine, where Israel maintained an intelligence headquarters
during the 19 years that the Christian town was under Israeli occupation.
The car's original owner has told the police
that he sold his Mercedes 280 to two unidentified men without registering
the transaction; the two buyers, he said, appeared to come from a neighbouring
village. Adnan Addoum, the Lebanese Prosecutor General, says he is prepared
to open a criminal investigation into Mr Ghanem's death if his widow agrees.
In which case we might find out if two
men took the secrets of the Sabra and Chatila massacre to their graves.
