Agents Mahmoud Rafeh, Hussein Khattab Sentenced to Death

Agents Mahmoud Rafeh, Hussein Khattab Sentenced to Death
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19/02/2010 Mahmoud Qassem Rafeh, a retired member of Lebanon's Internal Security Forces was sentenced on Thursday to death for having spied for the Israeli enemy and for his involvement in the murder of brothers Mahmoud and Nidal Majzoub, members of the Islamic Jihad group.

http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=125295&language=en

Rafeh, 63, was convicted of "collaboration and espionage on behalf of the Israeli enemy," according to the verdict handed down by the military tribunal. He was also convicted of involvement in the 2006 car bomb murder in the southern coastal town of Sidon of the Majzoub brothers.

A second defendant, Hussein Suleiman Khattab, was convicted in absentia.

Under Lebanese law, they have the right to appeal. At the same time, any death sentence must be signed both by the country's prime minister and its president to be carried out.

Rafeh remains accused of the murder of Hezbollah officials Ali Hassan Dib in 1998 and Ali Hussein Saleh in 2003, as well as the 2002 murder of Jihad Jibril, son of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command leader Ahmad Jibril. The trial for those killings is still underway.

Rafeh was arrested in 2006 and confessed last year to having collaborated with Israeli intelligence agents from 1993.

"Justice was finally established and oppression was vanished," the mother of martyrs Mahmoud and Nidal Majzoub said following the verdict. "This is the verdict I was waiting for," she added while receiving congratulation calls.

"We wanted him to be sentenced to death in order for justice to be established," she explained, while calling for executing the ruling in the same place where her two sons were martyred.

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