Report: Suspect Involved in Assassination Plot against Jumblat Indicted
First Military Investigative Judge Riad Abou Ghaida issued a death penalty indictment that was reduced to life imprisonment against former Progressive Socialist Party member Youssef Fakher, nicknamed the Cowboy, on charges of an assassination attempt against PSP leader MP Walid Jumblat, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Friday.
Fakher was arrested in August by the General Security on charges of involvement in preparations to assassinate Jumblat, having links with Israel and for forming armed groups.
In his confessions, Fakher said that he had “a friendship relation with Syrian intelligence member, Mouhannad Moussa, when the Syrian army was still in Lebanon,” and that the latter was close to Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon Ghazi Kanaan.
“Five months ago we held a contact through Facebook and discussed the developments in Syria. Mouhannad told me that Walid Jumblat will not stay alive and that he will be assassinated before October 2016,” said Fakher according to the daily.
Although Fakher denied having links to the assassination plot, but when he was confronted by the judge in a question that read: “You said in the messages that you will someday take revenge on those who were the reason for your ouster from Lebanon for 30 years, whom did you mean?”
Fakher replied that he meant Jumblat and his subordinates.
According to the indictment, Fakher was a PSP military official in the area of Rawche during the Lebanese war before he traveled in 1987 to the United States where he married an American woman to obtain the US citizenship.
In 1998, he married a Lebanese woman and had three children. He did not visit his homeland for 24 years because he was wanted by the Syrian intelligence at that time period.
In 2011 Fakher traveled to Lebanon and the visit was followed by other trips in 2012, 2013 and the latest was in July 2016 before he was summoned for interrogations in August 1, 2016.
He was called in after the Lebanese General Security obtained information that the suspect held contacts with an Israeli resident close to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and that he held contacts for the purpose of supporting terror groups in Syria and recruiting spy agents in favor of Israel.
Source: Naharnet
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