Sentence Executed

In Beirut's plush American quarter the unshaven man in the dirty grey sweater attracted no attention. Ignored by the gossiping Lebanese police on the corner, he waited patiently until a grey Opel sedan got almost abreast of him in the narrow street. Then, calmly setting his shopping bag on the sidewalk, he pulled out a Beretta submachine gun and opened fire. Inside the car 34-year-old Colonel Ghassan Jedid Defense Commissar of Syria's outlawed Socialist Nationalist Party and onetime commandant of the Syrian military academy, slumped over dead.

Beyond the fact that he was a Syrian named Izzat Shaath, the Lebanese did not learn much about Jedid's assassin. Cornered in a nearby apartment building, Shaath waged a Chicago-style gun battle with 200 policemen for half an hour. Finally, wounded and out of ammunition, he tried to surrender, only to be shot through the heart by another Syrian--one who said he was a friend of Colonel Jedid.

Even in the absence of Shaath's testimony, however, no one in Beirut had any doubt as to who was behind Jedid's murder. In the two years since he fled to Beirut as a political refugee, Ghassan Jedid, fanatic antiCommunist, had spent his time laying the groundwork for a revolt against the Communist-infiltrated clique which Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj (TIME, Jan. 14) has led to power in Syria. Shortly after Jedid's arrival in Lebanon a Syrian court sentenced him to death in absentia for his alleged complicity in the assassination of a Serraj colleague. Early this month, during Serraj's show trial of 47 pro-Western Syrians charged with participation in an "Iraqi plot," the prosecutor again called for the death sentence on Jedid. To the angry Lebanese, whose relations with Syria were already tense, it was insultingly clear that the Syrian government had carried out the execution of Ghassan Jedid in the capital of Lebanon.

Since Jedid's own military group will want revenge, three Syrian leaders--Colonel Serraj, Communist Leader Khaled Bakdash and Arab Nationalist Akram Hourani--will themselves for some time to come be looking nervously out of car windows, and wanting protection.

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