by Nagib Khazzaka
BEIRUT - Lebanon's crisis deepened Sunday with the opposition spurning a plea for dialogue from the pro-Syrian president and as a UN envoy said he feared another high-profile political killing in the country.
Opposition figures led by veteran Druze politician Walid Jumblatt rejected an appeal for talks that President Emile Lahoud issued Saturday after a bomb blast in a Christian quarter injured 11 people and sparked fears of a return to sectarian violence here.
Lahoud later scrapped plans to attend an Arab summit in Algiers this week.
The opposition rejection means that an ominous standoff between anti-Syrian opponents and the current leadership is set to continue in an atmosphere of mounting political tension that followed the assassination February 14 of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
A special United Nations envoy to Lebanon and Syria meanwhile warned that under current circumstances Lebanon could suffer another political killing.
"I am truly worried about the possibility that a major Lebanese figure could be assassinated," envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said in remarks carried Sunday by Beirut Arabic-language newspapers.
"I had sensed trouble before the assassination of Hariri."
Jumblatt, whose father Kamal was assassinated in 1977, has stayed close to his headquarters in Moukhtara in the mountains southeast of here, abandoning his more exposed residence in Beirut.
He has said that prior to his death Hariri had warned him that both of them were potential assassination targets.
In New York on Saturday UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was "greatly concerned about the rising tension in Lebanon" and urged all parties to take steps "to safeguard the stability and national unity of the country."
Jumblatt has repeatedly demanded the removal of Lahoud to make way for dialogue. The president's mandate was extended by three years last October in line with a constitutional amendment approved under what was seen as intense Syrian pressure.
Syria at the time exerted significant political and military influence over Lebanon, where it had stationed some 14,000 troops. But in the face of public outrage here and abroad following the Hariri killing, blamed by the Lebanese opposition on Syria despite denials in Damascus, Syria has begun a military withdrawal.
Joining Jumblatt in rejecting dialogue with pro-Syrian Shiite parties such as Hezbollah and Amal have been Hariri partisans and the head of the Lebanese Maronite church, Nasrallah Sfeir.
Emboldened by huge demonstrations against the Syrian presence, they are insisting -- before a dialogue can take place -- on an international probe into Hariri's killing as well as the removal of the heads of Lebanon's security services and the public prosecutor.
"The conditions for dialogue are not right ... after the assassination of Hariri," said General Michel Aoun, who led an anti-Syrian campaign in 1990 and who remains an influential figure despite living in exile in France.
But in a gesture that could go some way toward easing friction thousands of Hezbollah partisans gathered Sunday for the first time at Hariri's tomb in central Beirut's Martyrs Square to pay tribute to the slain leader.
The site until now has been occupied by supporters of the Lebanese opposition, drawn primarily but not exclusively from the Sunni, Druze and Christian communities.
On Sunday morning they observed the Hezbollah ceremony peacefully and there were no reported incidents. The move toward a rapprochement was the fruit of efforts made by Nasrallah and Bahia Hariri, the late prime minister's sister.
03/20/2005 11:19 GMT