MIDDLE EAST: Tens of thousands of Lebanese gathered yesterday at the centre of Beirut to mourn legislator and newspaper publisher Gebran Tueni who, with two associates, Nicholas Flouti and Andre Mrad, was killed by a car bomb on Monday.
People of every age, sect and station of life walked across the wide expanse of Martyrs Square in clusters, crocodiles, twos and fours. The elderly picked over the uneven ground with canes, babes bounced in prams.
Chic Christian women in tailored suits; Druze men in black shirts and baggy trousers, white caps on shaven heads; Muslim girls in headscarves; teenagers in jeans and T-shirts. Many bore flags on staves, others wore flags wrapped round their shoulders.
They paused at the tomb of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, slain by a bomb on St Valentine's Day. Two lads carrying flags climbed up the statue to martyrs hanged by the Ottomans early in the last century. It was glorious spring weather, a day for a wedding, not for three funerals.
The crowd stood before the glass-faced office of the daily an- Nahar at the eastern boundary of the square, flags flapping overhead in the breeze from the Mediterranean sea.
Most of the flags were the red and white national standard, but there were also party flags of the Druze-led Progressive Socialist Party, the right-wing Maronite Christian National Liberal and Lebanese Forces factions, and Mr Hariri's Sunni Future party.
There were portraits of Mr Hariri, of Kamal Jumblatt, the Druze chief slain in 1977, and of Rene Muawad, the president who was murdered in 1989.
The throng opened a passage for Ghassan Tueni, the man who made an-Nahar a national institution, bowed but not broken. Gebran was his last child to die.
His family has had no respite from sorrow. The spate of car bombings began in October 2004 with a failed attack on transport minister Marwan Hamadeh, the brother of Ghassan's first wife and mother of Gebran. She and the only daughter died from cancer, the second son in a car crash.
Slowly the mourners began to drift towards the church along wide streets banked by golden- stone French colonial buildings restored under Mr Hariri's grandiose reconstruction plan for the commercial heart of Beirut devastated by the 15-year civil war. Elegant shops and cafes were shut, Beirut was on strike.
Bells tolled in flat, oppressive tones as deputies, ministers and other prominent people filed into the church. Anti-Syrian figures were cheered, those from the pro-Syrian bloc were booed. A fanfare greeted the coffins on the shoulders of party stalwarts.
A Greek Orthodox mass was said for all three martyrs with Catholic, Shia, Sunni, and Druze clerics lending spiritual support.
Christel Abi Fadel, a student leader from the National Liberals, said the UN must reach conclusions quickly about the assassinations. "They are killing everyone, we don't know who will be next. The people who killed Gebran Tueni are terrified of democracy."