Triple murder and suicide
After two cases of homicide were reported earlier in August, northern Lebanon witnessed a triple murder followed by a suicide on Wednesday morning.
Jack Hreiki, a 42-year-old psychiatrist, shot a 26-year-old lawyer named Chantal Ghanem; her sister Cheryl, a 29-year-old accountant; and their father Ghassan, a 58-year-old engineer; in the town of Batroumin in Koura.
The victims were on their way to work in Tripoli when they were shot with a pump-action shotgun.
Hreiki, whose fellow townsmen described as a “psychiatrist in need of a psychiatrist,” then went home and committed suicide.
Sources from Batroumin told NOW Lebanon that Hreiki knew his victims, as he had harbored unrequited love for Chantal, who had rejected him, for three years.
The residents of the house outside of which the shooting took place told NOW Lebanon that the family often took that road to Tripoli, where the three victims worked.
Hreiki had waited for them in town, and when he blocked their path, the father emerged from the car in an attempt to dissuade him from shooting. Ghassan was targeted first.
Hreiki then shot and killed the man’s two daughters, who had witnessed the first shooting from the car, an eyewitness told NOW Lebanon.
According to a close friend of the family, the girls’ father on Sunday had expressed fears to his friends in the village that the man would harm his daughter.
Hreiki had threatened the girl before, sources said, and the Ghanem family had alerted the ISF.
The homicide is the third this month, after a double murder was reported in Jal al-Dib, a town on the main coastal highway just north of Beirut. A Lebanese man discovered his wife, Janet Shukrallah Hajal, born in 1942, and his son, Roy Samir Al-Ashqar, born in 1971, stabbed to death in their apartment, the Voice of Lebanon radio station reported.
Local media organizations reported that neighbors said the woman had left a suicide note in which she confessed to killing her schizophrenic son before taking her own life.
Also in August, 27-year-old Fouad Bachir Itris was found dead in his bed in Zokak al-Blat, a section of the capital. The circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear, but it garnered the attention of the local media and security forces.
Security forces are pursuing investigations into the Jal al-Dib and Zokak al-Blat murders.