BEIRUT (AFP) – A Lebanese judge turned down a request to release two of four high-ranking security officials detained for their alleged role in the murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri, a judicial source told AFP. Investigating magistrate Elias Eid turned down the request by lawyers representing former head of Lebanese military intelligence Raymond Azar and the head of President Emile Lahoud’s presidential guard, Mustafa Hamdan.They were arrested in August along with former general security chief Jamil al-Sayed and ex-internal security head Ali al-Hage following recommendations made by an initial UN probe into Hariri’s February killing.

SULTAN YACOUB, Lebanon (Reuters) – Three gunmen pop up behind some rocks near Lebanon’s rugged border with Syria.  "Go back. This area is off limits," one bellows down the hillside, which conceals a network of tunnels used by a pro-Syrian Palestinian faction to shelter weapons and fighters.A roadside bomb made from an artillery shell and connected to a wire peeks out of a small ditch near the entrance to the base controlled by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), ready to repel any attack.

Hidden in remote valleys or perched on strategic hills, guerrilla positions run by Damascus-based Palestinian groups dot Lebanon’s frontier with Syria, among the last remnants of its military and political domination of its smaller neighbor. Lebanese have long turned a blind eye to these posts, but they have been in the spotlight since a U.N. resolution last year demanded foreign troops withdraw from Lebanon and militias — a reference to Palestinian factions and Hizbollah — disarm.

 Syria has called through its state-controlled Damascus daily Tishreen for a massive demonstration in Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Thursday, to overthrow premier Fouad Siniora’s government. The call was widely dubbed by the Lebanese media as a flagrant intervention in Lebanon’s domestic affairs in defiance of the global pressure on the Al-Asad regime to take its […]

Beirut, 15 Nov. (AKI) – The leader of Lebanon’s largest opposition party, General Michel Auon, was set on Monday to begin an official visit to the United States, a trip in which the former prime minister is expected to try to win Washington’s backing of his candidature in any eventual presidential election in Lebanon. "Aoun was formally invited by the American authorities, but for the moment we cannot provide any detail on the length of the visit or the meetings which the General will hold with officials in Washington," Aoun’s spokeswoman, May Aql, told Adnkronos International (AKI).

Aoun, whose Free Patriotic Movement won 21 seats in parliamentary elections in May, is seen as a possible successor to Lebanon’s besieged president, Emile Lahoud. While his term in office only expires in 2007. "What is certain is that during this trip Aoun will try to establish direct, high level contacts with American officials ahead of eventual presidential elections," says Saad Kiwan, a journalist with the Lebanese newspaper, as-Safir, told AKI. Aoun returned to Lebanon just before the May elections after spending almost 15 years in exile in Paris. He fled Lebanon in 1991 after Syrian troops defeated his forces during one of the closing battles of Lebanon’s civil war.