Lebanon’s military tribunal has sentenced two Lebanese to seven-and-a-half years in prison after finding them guilty of spying for Israel, reported the Daily Star newspaper.
The two men, Elias Tanios and Raja Qabalan, were part of a group of Lebanese detainees handed over by the Syrian authorities in December.
The court found Tanios and Qabalan guilty of spying for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service and recruiting members of the Syrian Army to spy for the Jewish state.
Tanios, who was arrested in 1992 and sentenced to eight years in jail in Syria, confessed to recruiting a Syrian national to spy for Israel. Qabalan said he introduced Syrian Ghassan Alloush to Albert Haddad, a former South Lebanon Army militiamen who assigned Alloush spying missions for Israel, said the paper.
On Saturday, the court sentenced 21 Lebanese for collaboration with Israel, including 11 former SLA members to death in absentia for having tortured Lebanese resistance in the notorious Khiam prison in the former Israeli-occupied border zone in southern Lebanon.
The trials against those accused of collaborating with Israel started 10 days after the May 24 pullout of Israeli troops from Southern Lebanon. Since then, Beirut's military court has tried 2,478 suspected collaborators.
To this day, 30 have been sentenced to death, all of them in absentia.
Three detainees died in prison while awaiting trial, in conditions condemned by the human rights group Amnesty International.
Amnesty and other organizations have called the trials a parody of justice, arguing they do not serve the cause of national reconciliation – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
