Beirut Gunmen Slay Aoun Supporter, Family : Lebanon: The Christian clan leader’s murder threatens to unleash a new spate of political killings.

AMMAN, Jordan —  Uniformed gunmen Sunday shot and killed a Christian leader and his family in East Beirut, raising the specter of renewed political violence in the Lebanese capital.

Just one week after Syrian-backed brigades of the Lebanese army brought down Christian strongman Michel Aoun, the assassins broke into the apartment of Dany Chamoun, scion of one of Lebanon’s strongest Christian clans, and killed him, his German wife and their two sons.

Press reports from Beirut said the gunmen used silencer-equipped pistols and escaped unnoticed in a neighborhood under Syrian military control. The residence is in Baabda, site of the presidential palace, Aoun’s stronghold until last weekend. Chamoun was an Aoun supporter.

The 56-year-old clan leader was the son of the late Camille Chamoun, a former Lebanese president and key political leader in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. The younger Chamoun commanded the family militia, the Tigers, during the first years of the civil war in the mid-1970s.

He and his troops did not participate directly in the conflicts between Aoun, the sacked commander of the Lebanese army, and his Syrian and Christian militia enemies over the last two years. But Chamoun gave open political support to the general, who is now holed up in the French Embassy in Beirut seeking asylum in Paris.

Chamoun was chairman of the National Liberal Party, which opposes the government of Syrian-backed President Elias Hrawi--the government that Aoun rejected.

Said Elie Mobayed, a party official: “His (Chamoun’s) blood will not be . . . unavenged even after 100 years. This is the outcome of Hrawi’s government.”

The Lebanese president, who was in Damascus for talks with Syrian President Hafez Assad when the killings took place, declared them “an act of aggression against the state security.”

The attack threatens to unleash a series of revenge attacks that would deny Hrawi his bid for stability under Syrian political and military tutelage.

All the competing pilots in Lebanon’s political cockpit moved quickly to accuse and deny. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and head of a pro-Syrian militia, put the blame on Samir Geagea, commander of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces militia. Geagea’s and Aoun’s forces fought a bitter internecine war for control of the Christian heartland in the first half of this year.

But Geagea denied any role in the killings, not the first in Lebanon’s vicious feuds in which whole families have been assassinated. Geagea himself played a role in the assassination of Tony Franjieh, another Christian clan scion, and his family in 1978.

“Personal ties bound us to him (Chamoun) despite differences in political points of view,” Geagea told reporters.

According to press reports, three men wearing military fatigues asked a doorman for directions to Chamoun’s residence that led them to a fifth-floor flat.

It was not clear how the killings were discovered, but the reports said military police found the bodies of Chamoun, his wife, Ingrid, and their sons, Jerome, 7, and Tarek, 6. Other reports said the gunmen wore hoods, but no witness was identified.