Black-shirted
plainclothesmen ruthlessly beat up protesters against
the massive opposition arrests Thursday. They also roughed
up army troops and police when they attempted to stop
the beatings, witnesses told Naharnet.
The scuffles flared around the Justice palace for three
hours in central Beirut before troops and red-bereted
Lebanese riot police managed to smuggle out the protestors
away from the savage black-shirts, said the witnesses.
(See more details in story below).
The
clash came as authorities fine-tuned their charges
against opposition detainees to stop a snowballing
uproar over Lebanon's alleged drift to an army-ruled
police state.
Interior
Minister Elias Murr said Samir Geagea's Lebanese Forces
and Gen. Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement have been
conspiring to partition Lebanon into sectarian federal
states, wagering on a scene-setting Israeli military
strike.
This
scenario has shaped up from army investigations, which
also showed that both the LF and the FPM were scheming
to fragmentize the nation's fighting machine to coordinate
with the hoped-for Israeli blow to enforce the partition.
Murr's
accusations were a far cry from the original charges
by the army command that the FPM and the LF were plotting
to ignite another civil war.
Several
parliament members shrugged off all charges as a poor
attempt by the regime to justify the 'huge blunder'
of staging the biggest wave mass arrests since the
1975-1990 civil war without legal grounds.
In
a hurriedly arranged news conference, the legislators
disputed Murr's contention that the military clampdown
was under the ceiling of the law because Prosecutor-General
Adnan Addoum had signed the arrest warrants.
The
protesting legislators charged separately that the
arrests were evidence that the army's intelligence
branch was scheming to oust Premier Hariri's government
and install a military junta in power.
The
army expanded the scope of the arrests Wednesday to
include 10 activists of Dory Chamoun's National Liberal
Party who were distributing NLP leaflets pronouncing
freedom in Lebanon dead.
The
Beirut military court on Wednesday began the trails
of the detained FPM and LF activists. Ten Aounists
were given jail terms ranging from five days to 45
days and eight were acquitted and set free.
