Kuwait vows to deport foreigners who joined in mourning for Mughniyeh
The Gulf state of Kuwait plans to deport foreigners who took part in a rally last month to mourn slain Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyeh, the interior minister said on Sunday.
“We will deport any foreigner who took part in the mourning rally. This is a decision we will implement and we will not back down,” Sheikh Jaber Khaled al-Sabah told Al-Watan newspaper. He did not say how many people will be deported or if the ministry has begun rounding up suspects.
The rally, in which hundreds of Shiite activists including Kuwaitis, Bahrainis, Lebanese and Iranians took part, caused uproar in the oil-rich emirate because Mughniyeh was accused of hijacking a Kuwaiti plane two decades ago.
Reactions to the protest have taken a sectarian turn in Kuwait, where a third of the native population of 1 million are Shiites.
Two Kuwaiti lawmakers, Adnan Abdel-Samad and Ahmad Lari, and a number of Shiite activists are being sued by four lawyers and the interior minister in connection with the protest.
Three leading activists have been remanded in custody and were being questioned on suspicion of belonging to “Hizbullah Kuwait,” an organization that may or may not exist.
The prosecution service also plans to interrogate others, including former MPs and a member in the municipal council on the same charges.
Abdel-Samad and Lari cannot be interrogated unless Parliament strips them of their immunity, however.
Mughniyeh, who was killed last month in a car bomb in Damascus, was described at the rally as a “martyr hero,” but Kuwait says he was responsible for killing two Kuwaiti passengers on a hijacked plane in 1988.
In other developments, Mughniyeh”s widow, Saada Badreddine, dismissed on Saturday reports that she had accused “any Arab country” of killing her husband.
“Such media reports are pure fabrications and only aim at obstructing investigations and claiming the innocence of the Zionist state,” she said in a statement issued by Hizbullah”s news office.
Quoting Iranian Web site Alborz, Israeli and Gulf media reported last week that Badreddine had claimed that Syria was behind her husband”s killing.
“The Syrian traitors assisted in my husband”s murder,” the site quoted her as saying.
“The Syrian refusal to let Iranian investigators do their job is proof of Damascus” complicity in my husband”s murder,” she reportedly said.
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said last week Lebanon was interested in “getting more information” on the Syrian-probe into the assassination the Hizbullah commander.
The state-run National News Agency said Siniora gave instructions to State Prosecutor Saeed Mirza and Higher Lebanese Syrian Council head Nasri Khouri to contact the Syrian authorities with the aim of getting “informed on the ongoing investigation in the assassination of Lebanese citizen Imad Mughniyeh, who is a member of the Hizbullah command.”
The premier also wanted “official notification of the details of the assassination that had been carried out on Syrian territory and progress of the investigation so that Lebanese judicial authorities would be fully aware of this issue,” the report added, without further elaboration.