PIERRE Gemayel was the victim of a classic terrorist hit: the vehicle he was driving was blocked in a Beirut suburb in broad daylight, and the unmasked gunmen simply strode up and blew him away.

At his funeral, his family decided against allowing the public to view his horribly disfigured corpse: the coffin stayed firmly sealed. It contained not only the mortal remains of a young man cut down in his prime, but also the ephemeral hope that Lebanon might, in due course, succeed in exorcising the ghosts of its troubled past.

In faraway London, Alexander Litvinenko faced a rather different ordeal: a lingering and painful death as a consequence of polonium poisoning. The former Russian spy literally withered away for three weeks before he died: his hair fell out, he could retain no nutrition, and hospital visitors described him as looking like a ghost. Litvinenko’s father said it was as if a tiny nuclear bomb went off inside his son.

In both cases, suspicion immediately fell on state actors. In Lebanon, a number of personalities opposed to Syria’s influence on their country have been murdered since former prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in February last year. By inclination and by descent, Gemayel falls in the same category, although this scion of one of Lebanon’s most prominent Christian families does not appear to have been particularly outspoken.

Litvinenko, on the other hand, was a loud — albeit not terribly significant — critic of the Putin regime. Back in 1998, while still an employee of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB (which, incidentally, was headed by Vladimir Putin until Boris Yeltsin made him prime minister in August 1999), Litvinenko called a press conference to announce that he had refused orders to bump off Boris Berezovsky, one of the leading “oligarchs” who made a killing during the privatisation spree that followed the demise of the Soviet Union. By then Berezovsky had fallen foul of the Kremlin, but Litvinenko’s allegation, although not entirely improbable, was unsubstantiated. Subsequently, his credibility was also undermined by the fact that since that period he has been on Berezovsky’s payroll.

Litvinenko’s dissent earned him two spells in prison, but the charges against him were dropped both times. Before a third case could proceed, he slipped out of Russia with the help of Berezovsky’s circle and was granted asylum in Britain. (The oligarch successfully sought refuge in the same country at about the same time.) A year later, in 2001, Litvinenko published The FSB Blows Up Russia, in which he blamed the security services for a series of bombs planted in apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere that claimed at least 300 lives and were used by Putin as a pretext for launching the second invasion of Chechnya, on the grounds that the terrorist acts were perpetrated by Chechen rebels.

This accusation has also been made by numerous other sources and there is an element of plausibility attached to it, even though no conclusive proof has emerged one way or the other. The same cannot be said of some of the “revelations” contained in Litvinenko’s next book, The Criminal Group From the Lubyanka, notably the claim that Al Qaeda operatives, including Ayman Al Zawahiri, received training in Daghestan from the FSB, and that the latter was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Litvinenko’s value as a whistleblower was, thus, compromised by what appears to be an unusually fertile imagination. And despite his close association with Berezovsky, who has been on the warpath against Putin, there is no apparent reason why the Kremlin might have been especially eager to silence Litvinenko at this juncture. One is also compelled to wonder why the FSB, if it was for some reason determined to murder him, choose a method that would so obviously be associated with state action.

Experts suggest that in order to be effectively deployed as a poison, polonium 210 — a naturally occurring radioactive substance that was discovered by Marie Curie more than 100 years ago — requires processing in a nuclear laboratory. That doesn’t, of course, rule out its acquisition on the nuclear black market. Polonium 210 needs to be directly ingested in order to do its worst, but evidence of contamination at various spots in London has nonetheless sparked a scare.

At least two alternative theories have been doing the rounds: that Litvinenko may have been targeted by rogue elements in the FSB, possibly former associates who still bore a grudge over what they perceived as a treacherous betrayal; or that he may have been poisoned by members of Berezovsky’s circle (with or without Litvinenko’s connivance) in order to embarrass Putin. The latter speculation seems particularly far-fetched. But who knows? And then there’s always the possibility it was some sort of a gangland killing: the Russian mafia operates with relative impunity in many parts of the world, and it is possible Litvinenko may have paid the price for crossing a petty godfather at some point in the past.

Scotland Yard is on the case (although Sherlock Holmes might have proved more resourceful), and detectives were heading this week for Rome and Moscow to interview an Italian and two Russians whom Litvinenko met on the day he fell ill. Intriguingly, the former, Mario Scaramella, was believed to be carrying documents that named the purported killers of Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist gunned down in Moscow last month, whose murder Litvinenko was supposedly investigating.

From his deathbed, Litvinenko pointed an accusatory finger at the Putin administration, and his friends and associates have been mouthing a well-rehearsed mantra, with plenty of assistance from sections of the British media. They could be right — the Russian government is no stranger to random brutality, and it is not uncommon for opponents of Putin to mysteriously be snuffed out — but in the present case a healthy dose of scepticism would be a sensible option until the heat generated by the bizarre killing is replaced by a lot more light. There is clearly more to this murder than meets the eye.

There are times when Russia still seems to fit Churchill’s description of it as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But something similar could probably be claimed about Lebanon where, as old hands such as Robert Fisk constantly remind us, nothing is necessarily what it seems.

As in the case of Litvinenko and the Kremlin, the fingers pointed towards the leading suspect in the killing of Pierre Gemayel raise an obvious question: why would Syria demonstrate criminal stupidity at a point when — having only just restored relations with Baghdad, and with Syrian diplomats being consulted by the Baker commission on Iraq — it faces the prospect of a broader role in regional affairs?

Similar questions arose after Hariri’s assassination last year, and those of us who were inclined at the time to give Syria the benefit of the doubt had to contend later with a UN investigation’s findings that point towards a Syrian connection. Even before the young Gemayel’s murder, Lebanon faced disarray over a proposed UN tribunal to try suspects in the Hariri case, plus the exit of Hezbollah and Amal ministers from the cabinet of Fouad Siniora, amid demands for greater Shia representation in a government of national unity.

Notwithstanding the boost to Hassan Nasrallah’s ego and ambitions in the wake of Israel’s failure to destroy Hezbollah during last summer’s war, the call for a better political deal for Shias is not entirely groundless. Although no official figures on Lebanon’s sectarian breakdown have been released since 1932, it is estimated that the Shias long ago overtook Christians as the largest single group and now account for about 40 per cent of the population. Were such a figure to be justly reflected in cabinet seats under Lebanon’s confessional constitution, it would effectively give Hezbollah control over the government.

Needless to say, Hezbollah too is a suspect in the Gemayel affair. At the same time, it has been suggested that the angst and uncertainty unleashed by the murder could make the Shia ministers amenable to a compromise. In the current Lebanese polarisation, the Sunnis and most Maronite Christians are united against the Shias. But Hezbollah’s military strength is unmatched, and the army is largely Shia, so any civil war would not only be a profound tragedy, it would also be an unequal contest. Unless — or, rather, until — Israel stepped in.

Pierre Gemayel, by all accounts, was a relatively innocuous young man. It was his grandfather, also named Pierre, who, inspired by Hitler’s Nazi hordes, established the Phalangist movement in Lebanon. That didn’t prevent Israel from collaborating with the Phalangists during its 1982 invasion. When the Israel-approved president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, was killed in a bomb blast (in what is assumed to have been a Syrian initiative), his place was taken by his older brother, Amin — who now cuts a distraught figure as a bereaved father. It’s worth remembering also that it was Phalangist militias that did Israel’s dirty work, under a deal negotiated by Ariel Sharon, at Sabra and Shatila.

It is certainly possible that the past may have played a role in the brutal execution of Amin Gemayel’s son. It may have been the work of rogue Syrian agents who weren’t following Bashar Al Assad’s orders. Or the killing could have been carried out by elements determined to defame Damascus. It’s conceivable that the whole truth will never emerge. All one can hope is that despicable act will not be allowed to compound Lebanon’s open-ended agony.

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