Family Of Slain Lebanon Activist Urges UN Probe Into Port Blast

The widow of Lebanese intellectual Lokman Slim called Friday for a UN fact-finding mission to determine whether his assassination and two other murders are linked to the Beirut port explosion

Beirut, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Feb, 2023 ) :The widow of Lebanese intellectual Lokman Slim called Friday for a UN fact-finding mission to determine whether his assassination and two other murders are linked to the Beirut port explosion.

A secular activist from a Muslim family, 58-year-old Slim was found shot dead in his car on February 4, 2021, a day after his family reported him missing.

Beirut's catastrophic August 4, 2020 port blast killed more than 200 people, injured thousands and ravaged swathes of the capital.

Nobody has been held responsible in either case.

Slim's widow Monika Borgmann urged the UN Human Rights Council "to commit itself" to a "fact-finding mission to support Lebanon and its people in its calls for justice and accountability".

Lebanon's own investigation into the blast "is not advancing and is hampered", Borgmann said at a ceremony marking the second anniversary of Slim's killing at his home in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

In one of Slim's last tv appearances, he accused the Syrian regime of having links to an ammonium nitrate shipment that caused the blast.

Borgmann urged any UN fact-finding mission to investigate Slim's killing and two other deaths that she said "could be linked to the port explosion".

She was referring to Munir Abu Rjeili, a retired colonel from the customs administration, and amateur military photographer Joe Bejjany, the circumstances of whose December 2020 deaths have also not been clarified.

"The culture of impunity and lack of accountability has gripped Lebanon for far too long," Borgmann said.