Habib Shartouni

Two days later Shartouni was arrested by the Lebanese Forces. Stating with no regrets or fear, the 24-year-old Shartouni confessed at a press conference before being handed over to the Lebanese Justice by the Lebanese Forces, he called Bachir a traitor and accused him of selling the country to Israel. Shartouni confessed, "I was given the explosives and the fancy long-range electronic detonator in West Beirut’s Ras Beirut neighborhood by Nabil al-Alam, Chief intelligence of the Party". "Alam" had close ties to the Syrian Intelligence Services and right after the assassination fled to Syria and vanished.

On October 20, 2017, the Judicial Council, Lebanon's highest state security court, sentenced Habib Shartouni and Nabil al-Alam to death in absentia in the case of the 1982 assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel. The Council also stripped former Syrian Social National Party members Shartouni and Alam of their civil rights.

Shartouni was handed over to Lebanese justice. Amine Gemayel, Bachir's elder brother, succeeded him to the presidency seat right after his assassination. Habib had spent eight years held captive in Roumieh prison without an official trial, until October 13, 1990 when he escaped during the final Syrian offensive in Lebanon that was aimed at wiping out the government headed by Michel Aoun. Shartouni was sentenced to death by the Lebanese court on October 20, 2017.

Shartouni had finally made up his mind to carry out the operation. On the night of September 13, 1982, he sneaked onto the second floor of the building housing the Kataeb Party Office in Achrafieh. His behavior did not arouse suspicion since he lived on the third floor of the same building with his sister and grandparents. He got into the room right above the platform on which Bachir and his companions would be seated and stashed about 40 to 50 kg of high explosives.

A few months later, he was advised by his parents to flee from Lebanon to Cyprus then to France where he attended a university in Paris and obtained a degree in business. He had spent his first year in Paris away from politics, until the late summer of 1977 during which he officially joined the SSNP upon his first visit to Lebanon and became an active member ever since.

Habib Tanious Shartouni, a Maronite Christian, was born in a small village called (Arabic: شرتون ‎) Chartoun in Aley, Mount Lebanon. In the early 1970s, only a few years before the outbreak of the civil war, he was inspired and became affiliated with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). When the Lebanese Civil War broke out, he volunteered to serve in one of the SSNP stations in Aley.

Habib Tanious Shartouni (born April 24, 1958) (Arabic: حبيب الشرتوني ‎) is the convicted assassin of the Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel.