Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi visited the South on Saturday, the first tour of south Lebanon by a Maronite patriarch in 275 years.

On his way to the city of Sidon, he made a stop in Rmeileh where residents welcomed him with claps, roses and banners carrying the patriarch’s photo and welcoming slogans.

The military prosecutor general has charged two Lebanese men with allegedly smuggling weapons from the Beirut Marina to Syria, a security source told As Safir daily published Saturday.

Wasim Tamim and Samir Tamim, who hail from the northern port city of Tripoli, are members of the most prominent movements in the former parliamentary majority, sources said in reference to ex-PM Saad Hariri’s al-Mustaqbal movement.

A Russian team is visiting Lebanon in an attempt to sign contracts with Lebanese authorities to have oil exploration rights in Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, media reports said Saturday.

As Safir daily reported that the delegation was carrying a message from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to his Lebanese counterpart.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain Le Roy has ruled out Hizbullah allegations that its ownership of weapons has increased fivefold.

During his final press conference in New York, Le Roy said that Hizbullah is probably better organized but he ruled out that it owns fivefold of weapons it used to own before.

Information Minister Walid al-Daouq accused the March 14 forces without naming them of seeking to confront the cabinet by shoving Lebanon into the events of Syria through the statement issued by Syria’s banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood on Friday lashed out at Prime Minister Najib Miqati, accusing him of “siding with the killers of Syrian children.”

Lebanon’s former envoy to the Arab League Assaad Abi Akl was found stabbed to death at his apartment at the Cairo suburb of al-Omraniyeh, media reports said Saturday.

They said the 70-year-old’s body was found by his nephew in his bedroom. He had received 65 knife wounds.

Thousands of people demonstrated in the northern port city of Tripoli on Friday night to protest Syrian President Bashar Assad’s deadly crackdown on pro-freedom protestors.

The demonstrators marched at around 11:00 pm in several Tripoli neighborhoods after holding a sit-in at the city’s al-Tall square. They returned to the square and held prayers for the soul of thousands of people killed by the regime in Syria.

A blaze broke out Friday in a fireworks depot near the Kuwaiti embassy in the capital Beirut.

Civil defense firefighters struggled to contain the flames as the sounds of explosions echoed across the area.

Dozens of relatives of Islamist prisoners detained in Lebanon's notorious main prison of Roumieh on Friday blocked the international highway linking the northern city of Tripoli to neighboring Akkar and the Syrian border, demanding the government to urgently “settle the cases of their detained relatives, who have been in jail for four years without a trial.”

The protesters called for “filling the vacancies in the Judicial Council panel, to which the Fouad Saniora government had referred dozens of cases following the al-Tal and al-Bohsas bomb attacks” against army troops.

Two members of the Islamist Jund al-Sham group on Friday made an attempt on the life of the chief of Palestinian Armed Struggle in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp Mahmoud Issa, aka al-Lino, Voice of Lebanon Radio (93.3) reported.

“While Palestinian national Mahmoud Abdul Qader and another Jund al-Sham member were planting a bomb near al-Lino’s house in the camp, they were spotted by the latter’s bodyguards, who shot and wounded the two,” the radio network added.