A portrait of Lokman Slim installed in the garden of the family residence during his funeral in Haret Hreik on Feb. 11, 2021. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine)
More than five months after Beirut’s acting first investigative judge suspended the investigation into the assassination of Shiite intellectual and outspoken Hezbollah critic Lokman Slim, the case gained new momentum. Halawi had decided on Dec. 5, 2024, to suspend the case “until new elements emerge.”
Following the Court of Cassation’s decision to remove Halawi from the case on March 20 for “obstructing the course of justice,” the first president of the Beirut Court of Appeal, Georges Harb, appointed Beirut’s Investigative Judge Roula Sfeir to take over the case. Sfeir then decided to reopen the probe and scheduled a hearing for June 12.
Slim was shot dead on Feb. 3, 2021, near the Saida-Sour highway in Addousieh (Zahrani, southern Lebanon), a Hezbollah stronghold, shortly after leaving the home of businessman and poet Mohammad al-Amine in Niha.
One month before his murder, he had spoken on the Saudi channel AlHadath about Hezbollah’s possible involvement in the ammonium nitrate imports, which caused the Aug. 4, 2020, explosion at the Beirut port.
In December 2019, 14 months before his assassination, militants stormed the garden of his residence in Beirut’s southern suburbs neighborhood of Haret Hreik and posted death threats at the entrance of his home. Slim then issued a statement calling on the Lebanese Army to protect him from any harm that might befall him, placing the blame in advance on former Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri.
In November 2023, after his predecessor, Charbel Abou Samra, retired, Judge Halawi took over the investigation that had started in 2021. Upon assuming responsibility for the case, Halawi met in May 2024 with the German consul and a German officer, after Judge Abou Samra had sent Germany a letter rogatory. His request aimed to obtain DNA samples that might be found inside or on Slim’s car, in order to identify the perpetrators.
However, “in the absence of new evidence” that could have been provided by Germany or by UNIFIL — whose post is located near the crime scene but whose cameras only record the inside of its compounds — Judge Halawi concluded in his Dec. 5, 2024, decision that “no further action was necessary as part of the investigation.”
However, 10 days earlier, on Nov. 26, 2024, Slim’s sister and widow, Rasha al-Ameer and Monika Borgman, had filed a legal action before the 6th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation, presided over on an interim basis by Judge Randa Kfoury. They requested that Judge Halawi be removed from the case, accusing him in particular of “showing bias” and arguing that such behavior “undermines the proper course of justice.”
In a ruling issued one week before Judge Kfoury’s retirement (on March 27), the court decided to remove Halawi from the case and ordered that the case be transferred to another judge. The decision was based on the grievances raised by the two plaintiffs, who blamed Halawi for refusing to “resort to international expertise on the grounds that such measures would undermine Lebanese sovereignty,” according to the wording of the ruling, as cited by a source close to the case.
The Court of Cassation noted that “although the minutes of the meeting between Judge Halawi and the two German officials mentioned that the latter had stated the mission they had been entrusted with was not technically feasible, no detailed record of the exchanges was found.”
According to the same source, during the meeting in question, preliminary questions were raised, following which Judge Halawi postponed the hearing pending the German Embassy’s conclusions.
However, he later forwarded the case to the Court of Cassation’s Public Prosecutor’s Office without obtaining those conclusions or the remarks of the two plaintiffs, despite the fact that they had been granted additional time to submit them, the source added.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office then requested that the judge collect the observations in question, but he did not. As a result, the court ruled that “the closure of the investigation before receiving the German Embassy’s response, before the Public Prosecutor’s conclusion, and despite the extension granted to the plaintiffs … justifies the judge’s removal from the case.”
The ruling further specified that “the judge who will be in charge of the investigation [in this case, Roula Sfeir] may, by virtue of her discretionary authority, revisit [Halawi’s] decision in light of the case file, the investigations it contains, the German Embassy’s letter, the plaintiffs’ observations and the Public Prosecutor’s opinion, once this opinion is communicated.”
This article was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour by Joelle El Khoury.
