36 years on the run a campaign to track down Habib Chartouni

The assassination of Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel has returned to the spotlight with the launch of an online campaign demanding the arrest of Habib Chartouni and his appearance before the judiciary, 44 years after the September 14, 1982 bombing of the Kataeb Party headquarters in Achrafieh, which killed Gemayel and dozens of others.

Chartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, confessed to carrying out the assassination before escaping from prison during the military clashes of 1990. In 2017, Lebanon’s Judicial Council sentenced him and Nabil al-Alam to death in absentia.

Despite the rulings against him, Chartouni continued giving interviews to media outlets close to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, amid a lack of effective official action to track him down and arrest him.

The new campaign seeks to collect signatures and obtain reliable information about Chartouni’s whereabouts, whether inside or outside Lebanon, in support of legal efforts to arrest him and pursue judicial proceedings against him.

The initiative comes amid major political changes in Lebanon and Syria following the fall of the Assad regime and shifting regional power dynamics. Lebanon had requested information from the Syrian authorities about Chartouni’s whereabouts in October 2025.

More than four decades after the assassination, the victims’ families are once again hoping to see the judicial process completed and Chartouni brought to justice in a case that still awaits concrete action after many years of waiting.