Ghosts and secrets at mass killer's funeral

Was it Elie Hobeika they buried yesterday? A hero, a patriot, a philanthropist who gave freely to hospitals and charities? Lebanese ministers mourned in the rows of seats, a message of sorrow was read from the Maronite Patriarch in Rome, and – on the orders of the president, no less – the medal of the Lebanese Commander of Merit was laid upon Hobeika's massive oak coffin. And there, in the front row, just 10ft from the remains, sat one of the most powerful men in the country: Lieutenant General Ghazi Kenaan, head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.

Could this be the same Elie Hobeika who led the Phalangist militia into the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps on Israel's orders, the same Elie Hobeika, trained as a militiaman in Israel, who supervised the slaughter in 1982 of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians – more than half the death toll of the World Trade Centre last September?

Could the smiling man in the portrait on his coffin – in a fawn jacket and gold-and-blue tie, smiling happily under his salt-and-pepper hair – have been the most ruthless war criminal in Lebanon?

Hobeika was ready to give evidence against Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, in Belgium in March – evidence he believed would prove that the then Israeli defence minister was directly culpable for the Beirut massacre. The car bomb that killed Hobeika and three of his bodyguards – two of their coffins flanked his yesterday – exploded less than two days after he had agreed to testify against Mr Sharon. So all of us felt another presence in the ugly little concrete church of Mar Tackla, with its blood-red stained-glass windows: that of the Israeli Prime Minister for whom Hobeika once worked and who, the Lebanese believe, ordered his murder.

The Lebanese police have already identified the car that blew Hobeika to bits. The professional assassins had erased the chassis serial number which would have allowed the owner to be traced, but Lebanese intelligence men found the engine number and telephoned Mercedes headquarters. It came back with the chassis number, and the police immediately traced the vehicle to a man living in the town of Jezzine – notorious under Israeli occupation for 19 years as a headquarters for Israeli Shin Beth intelligence men.

All this the congregation already knew. But they were intent on Hobeika's transformation from war criminal to statesman, from gunman to the cheerful womaniser who, not so long ago, graced the cover of Lebanon's version of Vanity Fair. Cars cruised the narrow street outside, playing Christian militia songs from the civil war. Some carried the same portrait that stood on Hobeika's coffin, the face of a man of reason, a middle-aged politician who, after the war, joined the pro-Syrian Lebanese government and became a friend of Syria. Hence, no doubt, General Kenaan's presence in the church.

But one picture showed a different Hobeika, 19 years ago, with a gunman at his side. This was a tougher, colder man, in dark glasses, the Hobeika who marched into Sabra and Chatila on 16 September 1982. He isn't smiling.

Brown-robed priests sang before the coffins as Hobeika's former colleagues tried to barge through the church doors. There were shrieks of anger as the doors closed and bodyguards lashed out at television crews in front of Hobeika's last mortal remains. The Great and Good of Lebanon turned their eyes away. Sulieman Franjieh, Michel Samaha, Michael Dagher, Pierre Helou. General Kenaan sat on his red-covered seat, listening intently to the words of Bishop Abu Jaudeh.

Hobeika believed in Lebanon, had "always gone to help the needy'', was "never a religious fanatic'' – this from the Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir – and some around the church nodded agreement, men who would have been Hobeika's age at the time of Sabra and Chatila. And to be sure, some knew the truth: which man preferred to kill with a knife; who raped Palestinian women before disembowelling them; who shot the young men at the death wall; who murdered old Mr Nouri in his pyjamas.

Yes, they would have known, those unsmiling men. Some must have known what Hobeika wished to tell the proposed tribunal in Belgium about Mr Sharon. Some may have evidence of their own – though we will never hear it. Thus we stood yesterday in a church of secrets.

But the greatest secret of all lay inside that huge coffin: who was Elie Hobeika?