LONDON, Oct 20: Wissam al-Hassan knew he was a marked man. Last week, as he briefed Lebanon’s opposition leaders on the case on which he had staked his career, the spy chief told them that assassins were again stalking the country.

Virtually besieged in their homes since the early summer, his hosts hardly needed the warning.

Hassan brought with him evidence that he said strengthened the case against his highest profile target, Lebanon’s former information minister, Michel Samaha, who he alleged had collaborated with Syrian officials to plot bombings — like the very one that killed the veteran major general on Friday.

He died when a bomb in east Beirut blew up the car he was in during the rush hour, killing at least seven others and injuring scores more.

A feared spillover of the violence in Syria into deeply fragile and sectarian Lebanon had been edging ever closer to inevitable.

The melting pot of the region has barely been holding together as Syria boiled, its fragmented sects increasingly drawn into a conflict that the Lebanese had dreaded but could do little to stop.

The case Hassan had built against Samaha was highly unusual in Lebanon, where bigwigs are rarely taken on. Those such as Samaha with powerful connections are virtually untouchable.

This case was different, Hassan said. Not just because of the weight of evidence against the accused, who had allegedly been taped by an aide acknowledging that he had been given explosives by the Syrian national intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk.

Added to that were the former minister’s allegedly incriminating phone calls: he had apparently recorded his key conversations, then downloaded them to his computer. Prosecution briefs rarely come stronger.

Syrian officials made no secret of their demand for Samaha to be freed and the case against him dropped. But Hassan defied them, a move deemed crazy by his detractors and seen as an act of nation-building by his supporters, who saw the crumbling of power in Syria as an overdue chance for Lebanon to assert its sovereignty against its interfering neighbour.

Western officials in Beirut were heartened by Hassan’s doggedness, with some senior diplomats believing that international arrest warrants against members of the Syrian inner sanctum could soon be issued - an unprecedented act.

Before the Samaha case, Hassan was already the most important anti-Syrian official in Lebanon. As head of the information unit of the internal security forces, he was one of the country’s two main intelligence chiefs.

Military intelligence is the other key player, historically aligned to Syria and to the roughly half of Lebanese leaders, known as the March 8 alliance, who have remained supportive of Damascus throughout its civil war.

Hassan was a patron of the 14 March bloc, named in memory of the day that the former prime minister Rafik Hariri was killed in 2005. No assassination since then - until Friday - had so rocked Lebanon to its core.

Assassins have long been a part of the Lebanese body politic. As Syria has deteriorated throughout the year, every senior 14 March member has at one point been warned of a threat to their life.

Fears of the Syrian crisis spilling over into Lebanon have been a constant refrain from both sides - one of the few things that the implacably split Lebanese political class can agree on.

So far, tensions have been by and large contained in pockets of Lebanon - Tripoli in the north, where an Alawite minority lives among a Sunni majority, and in mixed Shia/Sunni areas of Beirut. The Lebanese have spoken of a newfound resilience where the various sects may not trust each other, but do not want to return to their own civil war.

The assassination of such a high-profile figure and patron of the anti-Assad bloc could change all that. By nightfall, fingers were already being pointed by March 14. Tyres were ablaze on Beirut’s main roads. Gunfire was rattling through parts of the capital and Tripoli.

Hassan told his backers last week that he would stand on principle no matter what the cost. Lebanon is a far more dangerous place without him.

By arrangement with the Guardian