Lebanon in shock following Ketermaya crimes

By Malek Mohamad Mosbah in Beirut
For Al-Shorfa.com
2010-05-01

[FILE] Rana Abu Merhi (centre) came home to find her parents and two daughters, Zeina (left) and Amneh (right), murdered.

Lebanese are in still shock two days after angry villagers in Ketermaya took justice into their own hands and lynched a murder suspect in front of television cameras.

Mohammad Salim Msallem, a 38-year-old Egyptian, was being brought to the scene of the crime on Thursday (April 29th) to re-enact a horrific murder that took the lives of two elderly along with their two granddaughters the night before.

Angry villagers snatched him from police custody, stripped him down to his underpants, stabbed him and beat him up and dragged him through the village before hoisting his body on to an electric pole with a meat hook.

Msallem worked as a butcher in the village, and was accused of murdering and mutilating his neighbours Youssef Abu Merhi (75) and his wife Kawthar (70), along with their two granddaughters, Zeina (7) and Amneh (9). Police announced the arrest on Thursday morning, and said that they had found a bloody knife and t-shirt in his apartment, which were sent to the crime lab for DNA tests.

The revenge act took place in front of the press, with many onlookers filming it and taking pictures with their mobile phones.

"When the villagers found out that Msallem had been arrested on suspicion of the murder and that the police had found forensic evidence in his house, they were outraged, especially given that he raped a 15-year-old girl few months before and was sentenced to only one month," Lina, a colleague of the two slain girls' mother told Al-Shorfa. She declined to give her full name.

Lina said the girls' mother, Rana Abu Merhi, a divorcee who lives with her parents and works as a teacher, discovered the murder. "[Rana's] father used to accompany the two girls every morning to the main road to put them on the school bus, and then wait for them in the afternoon to take them home. On Wednesday afternoon, the grandfather was not waiting for his two granddaughters, so the bus driver took them to the door of their house and left," she said.

No one knows what happened inside the house, Lina said.

Unconfirmed reports in the media said Msallem, suspected of raping a 13-year-old girl in the village, was visiting the grandfather to seek his help in convincing the rape victim's parents to allow him to marry her.

Under Lebanese law, a rapist who marries his victim no longer faces prosecution.

"Apparently, the old man told him he could do nothing for him, and he went on a killing rampage, stabbing the man to death before killing his wife and their two granddaughters," a security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

When Rana returned home from work that Wednesday evening, she found four slain bodies lying on the floor, Lina said. "Her eldest daughter Rana was on her last breath and died in her arms. The criminal stabbed the four victims to death and mutilated their bodies".

Ketermaya did not sleep that night, according to villagers who witnessed Msallem's lynching. Police rescued the murder suspect and took him to a nearby hospital. But the villagers managed to storm the hospital, break into an intensive care unit and parade the body on the hood of a white car before finishing him off.

He was left hanging from the pole for about an hour, until the army finally intervened and took his body to the morgue. Later, the bodies of the four victims were delivered to their family and buried.

The crime grabbed the headlines in all of Friday’s daily Lebanese newspapers, with some describing it as "barbaric". Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar, Interior Minister Ziad Baroud, and Information Minister Tarek Mitri all condemned the crime.

The Internal Security Forces (ISF) issued a statement stating that DNA testing confirmed that blood taken from a T-shirt found in Msallem's house matched the blood of the grandmother. Blood on the knife also matched the blood of the 7-year-old victim Zeina.

"The tests also proved that that some of the sweat and blood on the knife's handle were of the suspect," the statement read on Friday. Forensic science expert and Lebanese American University professor Omar Nashabeh criticised the ISF statement, and accused the authorities of mishandling the situation.

"The match between the two [blood] samples does not automatically mean conviction, because such a verdict must be issued by an independent court. Regardless of the available evidence, no authority but the court has the right to issue a verdict. What happened means that there is no justice in Lebanon," he told Al-Shorfa.

"This barbaric act is unprecedented and possible only in countries where the law of the jungle prevails," Nashabeh said.

"The crowd killed Mohammed Msallem proudly, thinking that they were serving justice, but actually they killed justice itself. The public prosecution arrested no one and issued no statement. The same applies to the Ministry of Justice, which did not properly condemn the horrible crime that tarnished the image of Lebanon’s state and institutions," he added.

Ketermaya mayor Mohammad Hassan refused to describe his village as "above the law", adding, "Ketermaya was severely assaulted, as this criminal committed a horrible murder." He said villagers were awaiting funeral processions when the police arrived at the scene with the suspect.

"[The police act was] provocative, one that was not very well thought out, which triggered this reaction; however, this does not mean that my village refuses to let justice take its course," he said.

"That was a barbaric act in response to a barbaric act," Zaki Mahfouz, editor of the Society section of Al-Hayat newspaper told Al-Shorfa.

"These events brought back scenes of the barbaric civil war, during which similar barbaric acts were committed," he said.

"The visual and electronic media committed a gross mistake by running the images of the mutilated body of a man who was, at least at that time, [only] a suspect, and entering into the usual feverish [coverage] race without taking into consideration that there are children in front of the TV screens, just like the outraged mob who did not consider the angry youth who gathered around the scene of their crime," Mahfouz said.

"However, the worst thing is that the horribly mutilated body of the lynched suspect has distracted us from expressing our sorrow over the murdered victims, and it has taken us back to the darkness of the human soul," he added.

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