Dany Chamoun

Uniformed gunmen Sunday shot and killed a Christian leader and his family in East Beirut, raising the specter of renewed political violence in the Lebanese capital. Just one week after Syrian-backed brigades of the Lebanese army brought down Christian strongman Michel Aoun, the assassins broke into the apartment of Dany Chamoun, scion of one of Lebanon's strongest Christian clans, and killed him, his German wife and their two sons.

Uniformed gunmen Sunday shot and killed a Christian leader and his family in East Beirut, raising the specter of renewed political violence in the Lebanese capital. Just one week after Syrian-backed brigades of the Lebanese army brought down Christian strongman Michel Aoun, the assassins broke into the apartment of Dany Chamoun, scion of one of Lebanon's strongest Christian clans, and killed him, his German wife and their two sons.

A Lebanese Christian leader said that missing Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite is being held in West Beirut and "Syria has him under control." Dany Chamoun, leader of the rightist National Liberal Party, would not reveal his sources but doubts reports that Waite, who dropped from sight Jan. 20 on a mission to free foreign hostages, is being held at the Iranian Embassy in West Beirut. "Syria is responsible for every single hostage taken . . . " he said.

American hostage Charles Glass, looking haggard in a videotape released today by his kidnapers, choked back tears as he read out a poorly written statement that he was a CIA agent in Lebanon. "Many of you only know me as a journalist, but few know the truth. . . . I used the press as a cover for my main job with the CIA. . . . I came back to Lebanon on secret missions from the office of the CIA in London," the former TV reporter said.

The most important trial in Lebanon's modern history is unfolding in a packed courtroom with machine gun-toting security men and a slim, pale, balding defendant whose entrance brings spectators to their feet, cheering and waving.

Fighting for their political life and the hope of salvaging three weeks of peace talks, Lebanon's Christian majority dug in for a last stand Saturday amid growing signs that their fight to eject Syria from Lebanon is doomed to fail. Increasingly isolated even from their own nominal Christian government in Beirut, Christian Parliament leaders met through the night in this Saudi mountain resort for the second straight day in an attempt to end 14 years of civil war.

Arab League mediators on Tuesday called for the Lebanese Parliament to convene Nov. 7 to elect a new president, even as massive demonstrations broke out in East Beirut against a political reform plan devised by the Parliament to end the civil war.

While yet another round of talks is under way in Damascus aimed at promoting a political settlement in Lebanon, leaders of the Christian community here are defiantly ruling out a compromise with their Muslim counterparts. "They are playing in the mud," Samir Geagea, leader of the Christian militia group known as the Lebanese Forces, said of the Damascus talks. "We call this poetry."

A stretch of the Beirut-to-Tripoli highway here that has been converted into a makeshift airport runway has become the latest focus of the 11-year conflict between Lebanon's Christians and Muslims. Lebanese Christian leaders have been demanding that the nation's air carrier, Middle East Airlines, begin operations from the new runway, about 15 miles north of Beirut.

At the first press conference organized last week by Lebanon's rebellious Christian militia leaders, a young spokesman for the group apologized to foreign journalists for the hours of delay and confusion. "There is chaos," said the young man, whose name is Fadi, "because we are trying to make a revolution here."

If Lebanon has been slowly, agonizingly strangled by 13 years of intermittent civil war, as many Lebanese believe, then events of the past month may prove to be the final death rattle of this pathetic, baffling nation. For the first time since independence in 1943, the country is without a president--not even a relatively powerless leader like Amin Gemayel, whose six-year term of office expired Sept. 23 without a successor having been chosen.