Beirut - Syrian Brigadier General Rustom Ghazaleh, who has been implicated in the murder of a former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri, said Tuesday he was ready to resign if asked by Syrian President Bashar al Assad. 'If the leadership asks me to die a martyr, I am ready,' Ghazaleh, the former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, told the television news channel al Jazeera in a broadcast monitored in Beirut.

'And if they ask me to resign, I am also ready,' he added in the comments to al Jazeera in the interview in Damascus. Ghazaleh denied accusations of corruption, including charges last week by Syrian former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam that Ghazaleh took 35 million dollars from Lebanon's Al Madina bank which collapsed two years ago. 'These accusations are all baseless ... It is part of the unjust campaign against Syria,' he said. 'I am ready...all my relatives are ready, to disclose our financial statements, and if they find any Syrian dime in any country, let them disclose it,' he said.

By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, January 2, 2006;  BEIRUT -- On this morning, as on every morning since Oct. 17, 1985, Audette Salem cleaned the rooms of her son and daughter. She left his razor, toothbrush and comb as they were on the day her children were abducted from the streets of Beirut during Lebanon's civil war. She fiddled with her daughter's makeup and straightened her bed. She dusted the three guitars, the papers still on their desks and the pack that holds a 20-year-old cigarette, the artifacts of two lives interrupted.

Everything is there as they left it," she said. "I haven't changed a thing, nothing at all. It's all still there."At 70, quiet but determined, Salem is a woman who clings to memories in a country that prefers to forget.In the heart of downtown Beirut, ravaged by a brutal 15-year civil war, then rebuilt into a graceful, if somewhat soulless, urban hub, Salem joins other women every day in a protest demanding to know the fate of their children. Many believe they languish in jails in neighboring Syria. Others are not sure. Behind them, their children's faces stare from pictures tacked to billboards, blank faces with generation-old haircuts, the dates of their disappearances reading like a war memorial yet to be built.

The media in Lebanon and the Middle East has been quick to react to accusations by the exiled former Syrian vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam implicating President Bashar al-Assad in the murder of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.In Lebanon, some commentators class him as a traitor to his country while a leading anti-Syrian politician says the allegations prove Damascus was lying about its role in Mr Hariri's death.A pan-Arab paper believes his allegations confirm a UN report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis which implicates Syrian intelligence in the killing.

In neighbouring Israel, a longstanding enemy of Syria, commentators are split over the ramifications for Damascus.In Syria itself, the official media has published numerous attacks against Mr Khaddam, many of which accuse him of dishonesty and malfeasance.