Foreign News: Death in the Canyon

On a knoll overlooking the twisting road from the Lebanese mountain village of Beit Méri to Beirut, two men waited—as they had waited for two days—to kill Lebanese Premier Sami Solh. The sirens of Sami Solh's motorcade escorting him back to town from his mountain villa sounded down the canyon, and one of the men set his hand on the plunger of a battery box whose wires led down into the trunk of a disabled Ford parked beside the narrow road.

At that instant, a green Rambler also bound for Beirut rounded the turn. In it. were Fayet Esrouer and his pregnant wife, their five-year-old daughter and three relatives. The father was rushing his wife from Beit Méri to a hospital in Beirut, to give birth to her fifth child. Hearing the honking ministerial caravan and the siren of its motorcycle escort, Esrouer excitedly decided to pass the disabled Ford before pulling over to let the motorcade pass him. On the hilltop the confused assassin reached for the plunger a trifle too soon.

The blast of the concealed bomb tore the stalled Ford into shrapnel. It blew the Rambler off the road; the little car plunged in flames over a cliff into the steep gorge of the Beirut River. All five adults in the car were killed at once; the girl died hours later. The charred body of Fayet Esrouer came to rest sitting on a cliffside rock, feet propped up as if still on brakes, and hands still clutching the wheel that was no longer there. On the asphalt of the highway, the motorcycle cop was sprawled dead. Behind him, two gendarmes in a jeep sat dazed and bleeding behind shattered shatterproof glass. Stopped still farther back, Sami Solh's limousine turned round and sped up the mountain road. The assassins made off. That evening fellow townsmen of Fayet Esrouer lugged heavy oak caskets down the jagged river gorge to bring home to Beit Meri what was left of their friends.