SARAFAND, Lebanon: Two people remain in custody over Wednesday’s brutal slaying of a staunch supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad in south Lebanon, a crime roundly condemned by pro-Syrian politicians as well as former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

 

Mohammad Jemo, a Syrian Baath Party official and staunch supporter of Assad, was killed early Wednesday after being shot over two dozen times at his house in south Lebanon, security sources said.

 

“Assassinating anyone – Lebanese, Arab or foreigner – is rejected,” Siniora said in a statement. “We have suffered because of assassinations as a result of a difference in political opinions, and we reject this method, as we reject the use of violence and weapons against civilians.”

 

The head of the Future Movement’s parliamentary bloc also condemned Tuesday’s roadside bomb attack between Majdal Anjar and the Masnaa border crossing to Syria in the Bekaa Valley that killed a member of Hezbollah and wounded three others, according to security sources.

 

  The Military Police are handling investigations into the Majdal Anjar blast, the National News Agency said.

 

The March 14 General Secretariat, for its part, said Lebanon was experiencing an “unprecedented” level of political violence, citing the Majdal Anjar ambush and a car bomb attack earlier this month in the Beirut suburb of Bir al-Abed, a Hezbollah stronghold, which wounded more than 50 people. Jemo, 44, was fatally shot at close range by an assault rifle inside the sitting room on the ground floor of his three-story house in Sarafand, some 15 kilometers from the southern coastal city of Sidon, the sources said.

 

The assailants, the sources added, fled the scene after the shooting, which took place around 2:30 a.m. Jemo was shot 30 times from a distance of about 1 meter, said the sources, who spoke to The Daily Star on condition of anonymity.

 

  The sitting room was riddled with bullet holes. Jemo was carrying shopping bags from his car into the house when he was shot. His Lebanese wife, Siham Younes, was still by the car, carrying more bags from the trunk when her husband was gunned down.

 

“I heard a lot of shooting, but I thought it was far away,” Younes told The Daily Star. “But when I walked into the house I saw my husband dying in a pool of blood.” Jemo’s daughter, 17-year-old Fatima, was sleeping in her bedroom at the time of the shooting. She was in a state of shock when she woke up to the sound of gunfire to see her father killed.

 

 “Where are you dad? Who else is going to pamper me now?” she cried. The sources said the assailants appeared to be aware that the surveillance cameras at Jemo’s residence were out of order. They said security forces arrested at least two men – a Syrian and a Lebanese – linked to the case.

 

They said the Syrian national was apprehended shortly after the shooting after he refused to stop at a military checkpoint, about 1 kilometer away from the victim’s house. Police also confiscated his car, a Kia bearing a Syrian license plate.

 

The suspect said during a preliminary interrogation that he was carrying two Palestinian men to their place of work, the sources said.

 

  The Lebanese suspect, according to the sources, was arrested while driving his car at the time of the murder. Police were seen searching for more suspects in the groves of Sarafand, located on the Mediterranean coast between Sidon and Tyre.

 

  The Syrian state-run news agency SANA said an “armed terrorist group” assassinated Jemo, describing him as head of the political and international relations in the Global Arab Expatriates Organization. Younes said Jemo, who was also a member in the Syrian Baath Party, had received death threats on several occasions, adding that a Baath party official had recently warned her husband to be careful.

 

Younes said masked men had been also spotted roaming around her parent’s house in Sarafand lately.

 

  She acknowledged that her husband had visited Syria very frequently. “I wish he’d stayed there,” she said. Jemo was known for his passion for photography.

 

Pictures of him with Assad as well as with several Lebanese leaders, including Speaker Nabih Berri and Free Patriotic Movement head Michel Aoun, were hanging on the wall of the sitting room.Caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel described the attack as a “political crime.”

 

 “What is happening in terms of assassinations, bombs and car bombs are the result of this boiling political atmosphere,” Charbel told a local radio station.