Angry Lebanese bury assassinated editor
(AP)
Updated: 2005-12-15 08:46

Still, a Cabinet crisis was looming after Hezbollah and Amal, the main Shiite Muslim groups, walked out to protest Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's request Monday to the United Nations for an international probe into the killings and for a tribunal in the Hariri assassination.

The Bush administration endorsed Lebanon's call for a broader U.N. investigation and suggested the Security Council might consider tough sanctions on Syria if its resolutions designed to reverse its influence in Lebanon were disregarded.

In order to maintain an international spotlight on Syria and its need to cooperate, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We think it is very, very important that the council act to extend the mandate of this investigation."

Nayla(L), daughter of slain anti-Syrian lawmaker and press magnate Gibran Tueini, cries over her father's coffin during his funeral in Beirut December 14, 2005. [AFP]

Syria already has been accused of involvement in Hariri's murder, although Damascus denies this. A U.N. investigative team said it had evidence that Syrian and Lebanese intelligence played a role in the killing and Syria has been slow to cooperate in the probe.

In a special session of parliament, Tueni ally Akram Shehayeb told the assembly: "The equation is clear. He who gives orders is in Damascus. The executioner is here in Beirut."

In the Christian district of Ashrafieh, which Tueni represented in parliament, several thousand people marched behind the coffins of the lawmaker and his two bodyguards, wrapped in the national flag of red and white stripes with a green cedar tree.

The pallbearers rocked the coffins, a traditional sign of deep grief, as they made their way slowly through the crowds along several miles of streets. Residents showered the coffins with rice from balconies as the procession passed through Gibran Tueni Square, named after Tueni's grandfather, who founded An-Nahar in 1933, and headed to downtown Beirut.

A giant portrait of Tueni hung from the side of the An-Nahar office building, and hundreds of Lebanese troops and police took up positions in a facing square, where protesters gathered. The crowd waved Lebanese flags and held Tueni's picture, or those of Hariri and another An-Nahar journalist killed in a June bombing, before the procession moved to a nearby square and St. George Cathedral for a prayer service.

Many shouted insults against Syria, its President Bashar Assad and his Lebanese ally, President Lahoud.

"Listen Syria, you can take our lives but you can never take our freedom," read one banner.

"The rooster of An-Nahar is stronger than you, Baathist dogs," read another, referring to An-Nahar's emblem and Syria's ruling Baath party.

Saniora, politicians and dignitaries filed into St. George Cathedral, its bells tolling in mourning.

Mourners inside and outside the church, many weeping, then broke into applause as Tueni's father, An-Nahar publisher Ghassan Tueni, spoke: "No to revenge, no to hatred and no to bloodletting," he said, calling for Muslims and Christians to unite. "Let us bury with Gibran all the hatred."

After the prayer service, the convoy of coffins made a stop at the central Beirut gravesite of Hariri before the three were buried in the Ashrafieh cemetery.