An Egyptian man lynched by a Lebanese mob was buried in Cairo on Tuesday, after the Prosecutor General had ordered that a new autopsy be conducted by Egyptian forensic officers on his body. Lebanese Minister of Justice, meanwhile, apologised to Egypt over the murder. "On checking a preliminary report for the causes of Mohamed Msallem's death, submitted by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, the Prosecutor General ordered an autopsy on his body," a legal source said. He added that the prosecutor then handed over the body to his relatives for burial. The body of Msallem had arrived at the Cairo Airport from Beirut Monday night, and was stored in a mortuary because none of his relatives had showed up. "We were told that the body would arrive today [Tuesday] at eleven in the morning," Selim Msallem, the father of the lynched man, said. As he was ending the procedures, dozens of Msallem's relatives and friends congregated near Gate 35 of the airport's cargo area. They raised banners calling on the Egyptian authorities to ensure the killers of the man be brought to justice and denouncing the Lebanese police allegedly for not protecting him from the villagers. "We are waiting for justice," the father said. Msallem, an Egyptian suspected of murdering an elderly couple and their two young granddaughters in Ketermaya, 25 kilometres (15 miles) southeast of Beirut, was lynched by an angry mob on Thursday. Msallem, 38, was being driven by a police escort to re-enact his crime when several hundred residents of Ketermaya dragged him out of the police car and beat and stabbed him to death before hanging his body on a pole wit a butcher's hook. Meanwhile, the Lebanese security chief said he had ordered the arrest of two police officers for dereliction in protecting the Egyptian 38-year-old Msallem. "Officers Hesham Hamed and Marwan el-Rafai are under arrest over the brutal lynching," said General Ashraf Refi, the chief of Lebanon's internal security. Although ten suspects were ordered arrested over the incident, none of them have been apprehended, according to Lebanese sources. An Egyptian consular delegation held a meeting in Beirut yesterday with the Lebanese Minister of Justice, who assured them that he would bring to justice the killers of the Egyptian national and strung his body up with a butcher's hook in the revenge attack that has shocked Egypt.
