BEIRUT - Lebanese authorities have released all defendants suspected with lynching an Egyptian man in Ketermaya, Lebanon late in April over charges of murdering four Lebanese. "Eight Lebanese people, all residents of Ketermaya village suspected with murdering and lynching Egyptian Mohamed Msallam, were released on bail. The last one was released on bail on Wednesday," Lebanese media reported Thursday. It added that the eight defendants were not charged with murder. "The charges were re-identified from murdering him into disfiguring his corpse," a report in An-Nahar newspaper said. The eight defendants along with other unidentified residents of Ketermaya killed and lynched Msallam on April 29. Ketermaya residents charge that Msallem had raped a 13-year old girl and killed the family of four after the grandfather refused to mediate with the girl's parents. When police brought him to the scene of the crime a day after the murder, angry villagers overwhelmed the policemen, beat Msallem with sticks and stones and stabbed him. Lebanese officials including Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and minister of justice apologised for the incident, promising that justice would be brought to the murderers would be brought to justice. Talaat el-Sadat, an Egyptian lawyer for Msallam, in October said that the forensic report released by Lebanese authorities acquitted the Egyptian from the rape crime. "This way the killers will get impunity for killing and lynching an Egyptian man. Even if he killed the four Lebanese, residents were not allowed to take justice into their own hands," Samir Radwan, a lawyer assisting el-Sadat, said. Human Rights Watch called on Lebanese authorities at the time to prosecute the perpetrators and said nothing justifies mobs taking the law into their own hands. "The Lebanese authorities are facing a test: if they don't reassert the rule of law by prosecuting those who killed a suspect who was entitled to the presumption of innocence, the law of the jungle will have won the day."
