The Judicial Council, the Lebanese court that handles cases related to national security, launched Friday an in absentia trial in the case of the 1982 assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel, calling on Habib Chartouni — who confessed to planting the bomb before escaping prison — to turn himself in.
“The Council has decided to issue an ultimatum asking the accused Habib Chartouni to turn himself in within 24 hours at the latest from the March 3, 2017 trial session,” the Council said in a statement.
It also decided to launch an “in absentia trial” and to ask the Directorate General of Personal Status to verify whether a death certificate has been issued for Nabil al-Alam, the other main suspect in the case who reportedly died in 2014.
The Council also ordered the General Directorate of General Security to probe Alam’s alleged death.
Gemayel was a senior member of the Kataeb Party and the supreme commander of the Lebanese Forces militia during the early years of the civil war.
He was elected president on August 23, 1982 while the country was torn by civil war and occupied by both Israel and Syria.
Gemayel was assassinated on September 14, 1982, along with 26 others, when a bomb exploded in Kataeb’s headquarters in Ashrafieh.
Chartouni, a member of the Syrian Social National Party, was later arrested in connection with the assassination. His sister was a resident of the apartment above the room Bachir was in. He had visited her the previous day and planted the bomb in her apartment.
The next day, he called her and told her to get out of the building. Once she was out, he detonated the bomb from a few kilometers away from the building.
Two days later Chartouni was arrested by the Lebanese Forces. At a press conference before being handed over to the Lebanese judiciary by the LF, he called Gemayel a traitor and accused him of “selling the country to Israel.”
He said he was given the explosives and the fancy long-range electronic detonator in West Beirut’s Ras Beirut district by Nabil al-Alam, who was reportedly SSNP’s intelligence chief at the time.
Alam reportedly had close ties to the Syrian intelligence services and he swiftly fled to Syria after the assassination.
Chartouni spent eight years in Roumieh Prison without an official trial until he escaped on October 13, 1990 during the Syrian offensive to oust Michel Aoun from the Baabda Palace.