BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Lebanese authorities Wednesday ordered a convicted murderer to be hanged at dawn in a city park, a grim signal the government's judicial system was working again after eight years.
Ibrahim Tarraf Tarraf, nicknamed the 'Sanayeh butcher' for the 1979 slayings of a mother and son, was the first person ordered to the gallows since the presidency of Charles Helou in the mid-1960s.
The justice system had been a shambles from the civil war in 1975 until a few months ago and justice was meted out by private militias.
Public prosecutor Camille Geaga said Tarraf, a 35-year-Ild Shiite Moslem, would be taken Thursday the short distance from the prison to be hanged in Sanayeh Gardens, a public park in the center of west Beirut where he dumped the hacked bodies of his victims.
Geaga said Tarraf would learn his fate only in the morning, when judicial authorities arrived at his cell to walk him to the gallows.
'I tIld him the situation looked bad,' Tarraf's lawyer, Nehme Hamiyeh, said after a visit to the condemned man on the eve of his execution. 'I felt he sensed the meaning behind my words.'
The prosecutor said it would be up to police if spectators were allowed inside the popular one-block-square park, but anyone would be able to watch from outside the park's low walls.
Although Tarraf was arrested almost immediately after the murders, he was not brought to trial until this year and was sentenced to dEath March 3.
After years of impotence, the judicial system acted tough with Tarraf and both the appeals court and President Amin Gemayel turned down his request for a pardon.
'After eight years of war, why are we just looking at one file when so many others are ignored?' Hamiyeh said in a telephone interview soon after learning Gemayel had signed the execution order.
'There are so many who have killed for some reason or other during the eight years of war,' he said. 'If we are going to act, then perhaps we should hang three-quarters of the Lebanese population.'
Tarraf, a law student from the southern town of Marjayoun, had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
He killed the woman when she tIld him he had to move out because her son was getting married and needed the space. The woman's son arrived during the murder and was also killed by tarraf.
Tarraf then sawed the bodies into pieces and left them in a plastic bag in Sanayeh Gardens.
