A crowd gathered at the entrance of a building hit by an Israel strike on April 5 in the city of Ain Saadeh, east of Beirut. (Credit: Mohammad Yassin/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — The case of the Israeli strike that targeted a building in Ain Saadeh on April 6, killing three people — Pierre and Flavia Moawad and Roula Matar — and whose presumed target was a Hezbollah supporter who was not hit, is now in the hands of military justice, a judicial source told L’Orient-Le Jour on Thursday.
The army’s intelligence service, which closed its preliminary investigation on Wednesday after opening it on the first day of the tragedy, has concluded that the case falls under the jurisdiction of the judicial military court, and not the army’s internal military court. The security information gathered showed that, given the scale of the tragedy, security investigations alone are insufficient, and that it is necessary to refer the case to the judicial military court for a thorough investigation, the source explained. The source added that government commissioner to the military court, Claude Ghanem, has not yet reviewed the file, but is expected to do so soon.
No one has been arrested as part of the investigation: neither the presumed target of the Israeli army, nor Liza Rahmeh, the young woman at whose home the Hezbollah supporter was on the night of the attack. She was questioned and then released while awaiting the continuation of the investigation, the same source said, emphasizing that Lebanese law does not provide for prosecution against a person who hosts a Hezbollah member in their home.
Pierre Moawad, head of the Lebanese Forces bureau in Yahshoush (Kesrouan), his wife Flavia, and their neighbor Roula Matar were in the Moawad apartment on the third floor of the targeted building, below the apartment struck by the Israeli army, which claimed to have targeted a member of Hezbollah there, though no evidence has been provided.
