Lebanese Defense Minister Maurice Selim said that what happened recently in the Tayouneh area in the capital, Beirut, will not be repeated, stressing that the security forces are widespread and that there are no expected developments for the clashes that took place last Thursday and killed 7 people, most of whom belonged to Hezbollah and the Amal movement.
The minister stated - in a television interview yesterday, Saturday - that the stampede and clash in Tayouneh led to shooting from both sides.
Selim added that field testimonies confirm that young men entered the streets of Ain al-Remmaneh, and that the shooting caused chaos, and preceded the sniping operations.
The shooting began as a number of demonstrators headed to the Adliya area to participate in a protest sit-in called by Hezbollah and the Amal Movement in front of the Palace of Justice, to demand the departure of the judicial investigative judge in the file of the Beirut port explosion, Judge Tariq Al-Bitar.
Clashes took place with machine guns and heavy shells for about 5 hours in Al-Tayouneh, which separates the Shiite-majority district of Chiyah and the Christian-majority Ain Al-Remmaneh-Badaro district.
Both Hezbollah and the Amal Movement accused the Lebanese Forces Party of seeking to ignite a new civil war and shooting demonstrators in the heads by snipers, but the latter denied this and said that the responsibility rests with the leaders who took their supporters to that exact place.
The army initially said - last Thursday - that shells were fired at the protesters as they were passing through the Tayouneh roundabout, then later spoke of an exchange of fire when the protesters were on their way to the demonstration site.
The results of the preliminary investigations
On Saturday, the Minister of Defense stated that the authorities had arrested 19 people from both sides, including two Syrians, and said that the army and the Intelligence Directorate were not subject to pressure related to investigations.
Selim stressed that the decision regarding the investigative judge in the Beirut port explosion is taken in the judiciary, not in politics, as he put it.
Meanwhile, surveillance cameras in the Tayouneh area showed that one of the protesters was killed by an army soldier during the events of Bloody Thursday.
The video is clear. Two young men fell to the ground, one of whom was the assassinated victim, Muhammad Tamer. The army members fled as soon as the gunmen started shooting, leaving the young men unprotected.
The video confirms that the forces were the ones who shot unarmed protesters in a pre-planned ambush #Lebanon pic.twitter.com/hERhoC9Ope
— Ahmad M. Yassine |
Ahmed M.
Yassin (@Lobnene_Blog) October 16, 2021
The footage showed a group of young men trying to enter an alley in the area, while army personnel were working to prevent them from doing so.
The matter quickly developed into a soldier's shooting at the protesters, which led to the death of one of them.
The army said that the soldier who shot him is under investigation under the supervision of the competent judiciary.