AMERICAN LEBANESE COORDINATION COUNCIL

Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa also took part in the meeting, according to the daily an-Nahar.

Arab Foreign Ministers also held a meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly deliberations in New York and issued a statement denouncing political assassinations in Lebanon and calling for the holding of Presidential elections without foreign interference, the newspaper reported.

The ministers, in a statement, said they deliberated the “Lebanon developments and condemned the acts of political assassinations that have targeted a number of political figures, intellectuals and journalists. The last of whom was MP Antoine Ghanem” by a powerful car bomb blast in Beirut’s eastern suburb of Sin el-Fil on Sept. 19.

Such attempts, the statement added, aim at “destabilizing Lebanon and blocking the presidential elections.”

The ministers also called The “Lebanese political factions to maintain national dialogue with the aim of achieving the proper atmosphere for successful presidential elections in line with the constitution and the constitutional schedule and without foreign influence.”

The ministers, furthermore, asked Moussa to “proceed with his efforts and contacts with all the concerned parties to help the Lebanese” hold presidential elections on time.

Kouchner’s meeting with his Saudi and Egyptian counterparts and Moussa’s participation in the discussion came a few hours after the French foreign minister said he cancelled a meeting with Muallem because of the Ghanem assassination.

Kouchner said the meeting with Muallem was cancelled because he was “shocked” by Ghanem’s assassination.

“I was extremely shocked by this latest assassination … I felt that I should not meet my counterpart as had been planned,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.
Syria last Saturday rejected as “baseless and without proof” accusations by Lebanon’s ruling coalition that Damascus was behind the Ghanem’s killing.

Ghanem was the eighth Damascus critic to be killed in Lebanon since the February 2005 assassination of ex-premier Rafik Hariri, and the fourth anti-Syrian MP killed since the 2005 elections.

“This is an intolerable situation, and we are trying not to tolerate it,” Kouchner said. “The least we can do is to not pretend that he and four other people were not assassinated in the same attack,” he said.