Patterns of Global Terrorism 1996 - Lebanon

Lebanon's security environment continued to improve in 1996 as the country worked to rebuild its infrastructure and institutions. However, parts of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, and portions of Beirut's southern suburbs – including areas surrounding Lebanon's main airport – remain effectively beyond the government's control. In these areas, a variety of terrorist groups, including Hizballah, the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), the Abu Nidal organization (ANO), the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), continued to operate with relative impunity, conducting terrorist training and other operational activities.

Although no anti-US attacks occurred in Lebanon in 1996, the official US presence there remains under threat. Hizballah's animosity toward the United States has not abated, and the group continues to monitor the US Embassy and its personnel. Group leaders routinely denounce US policies and condemn the Middle East peace process.

Lebanon pursued several high-profile court cases against suspected terrorists in 1996:

• In October Mohammed Hilal, a former official of a Palestinian terrorist group, was convicted (in absentia) of throwing a handgrenade at the Kuwaiti Embassy in Beirut in March 1993 and of attempting to bomb the offices of Kuwait Airways in August 1993. The court sentenced him to life at hard labor and determined that he had acted on the orders of the Iraqi Government.
• Two men were tried in connection with the 1994 car-bombing death of Fuad Mughniyah, brother of senior Hizballah security official Imad Mughniyah. Both were found guilty. One was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor, the other to death. The death sentence was carried out 21 September.
• In October a military appeals court confirmed the life sentence of Hussein Tlays. Tlays had been found guilty previously of the 1986 assassination of a French military attache on the orders of a Hizballah official.
• The Lebanese courts also extradited a Palestinian, Yasser Shraydi, to Germany for trial in connection with the La Belle discotheque bombing in Berlin in 1986, in which three US servicemen and one Turkish woman were killed.

The Lebanese Government pursued through several appeals the case of the 1976 kidnapping and murder of US Ambassador Francis E. Meloy and Economic Counselor Robert O. Waring. In March the civil courts found the two accused guilty of the kidnappings but not the murders. Although the murder of diplomats is not covered by Lebanon's 1991 amnesty law, the law did apply to the kidnappings. Consequently, one of the accused was freed; the other continues to be held for unrelated crimes.