Mr Gemayel, 34, was shot in his car in a Christian area of the city. The head of the anti-Syrian coalition, Saad Hariri, blamed Damascus. Syria has strongly denied any involvement.

World leaders have condemned the cabinet minister’s killing, and the UN Security Council has criticised attempts to destabilise the country.

The army took to the streets of Beirut after the attack. Tyres were burned in the Christian neighbourhood of Ashrafiyeh. Anti-Syrian protesters also shouted slogans and blocked streets in the Christian town of Zahle in east Lebanon.

<B>Tribunal </B>

BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen says the assassination seems to have been designed to inflame sectarian tensions at a time when Lebanon was already going through a profound political crisis.

Last week, Lebanon’s cabinet endorsed plans to set up a tribunal to try those suspected of killing former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri – Saad Hariri’s father – despite the resignations of six pro-Syrian ministers opposed to it.

A UN report recently implicated Damascus in the killing of Hariri by a truck bomb in Beirut in February 2005. Syria denies the charges.

The Security Council approved the plans for the tribunal on Tuesday. The Lebanese government will now be asked to approve it formally.

Mr Gemayel, minister for industry, was a member of the Phalange Party and the son of former President Amin Gemayel.

Speaking to crowds of angry supporters outside the hospital where his son was pronounced dead, the former president called his son a martyr and asked for a peaceful reaction. “We don’t want reactions and revenge,” he said. International condemnation. At least three gunmen ambushed Mr Gemayel, ramming his car with their vehicle before spraying it with gunfire from point blank range.

The killing brought a swift reaction from world leaders, many of whom also offered backing for the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Siniora said assassinations would not terrorise Lebanon, adding: “We will not let the criminal killers control our fate.”

US President George W Bush called for a full investigation to identify “those people and those forces” behind the killing. Bush backed sSiniora’s government, accusing Syria and Iran of fomenting “instability and violence” in Lebanon.

“Syria’s refusal to cease and desist from its continuing efforts to destabilise Lebanon’s democratically elected government is a repeated violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions,” he said. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said the killing was “completely without any justification at all”, while Syria called it a “despicable crime”.

There was also condemnation of the killing from Iran and from the Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim Lebanese political and militant group. Tehran called the killing an attack by “Lebanon’s enemies”, while Hezbollah called for a swift investigation.

ONLY THE BEGINNING

<B>Lebanon’s Jumblatt expects more assassinations </B>

■ Anti-Syrian Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said yesterday he expected more assassinations of ministers and members of parliament aimed at undermining the ruling majority. “We have to expect, and this is my impression unfortunately, more assassinations of ministers and parliamentarians,” Jumblatt told a news conference. Lebanese Minister Pierre Gemayel, a member of the ruling bloc, was shot dead on Tuesday.

PROFILE

<B>Obituary: Pierre Gemayel</B>

■ Pierre Gemayel was a scion of one of Lebanon’s most prominent Christian political dynasties – although he himself never touched the peaks of power and influence reached by his forebears. But he will be remembered as the first serving government minister to be slain in a series of political assassinations that have rocked Lebanon since the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. The name Gemayel is inextricably linked to the rightwing Maronite Christian party, the Phalange, founded by his grandfather (also named Pierre) in 1936 and one of the main players in the bloody civil war that gripped Lebanon through the 1970s and 1980s. The Phalange has a controversial legacy from the war, during which it was allied to Israel and struggled to maintain the Maronite Christians’ domination of the Lebanese political scene. The biggest blow to the party came in 1982 with the assassination of Pierre’s charismatic son and successor Bashir Gemayel, shortly after he had been elected Lebanese president. Bashir’s more consensus-minded brother Amin became president and the party fell under Syrian influence. At the end of his term in office in 1988, Amin took his family – including Pierre Jr – into self-imposed exile, hoping it would help heal the divisions existing at that time between the Lebanon’s various factions. Power struggle From France, Switzerland and the US, the former president worked to support the growing movement to end Syria’s military and political control of Lebanon, a hang-over from the civil war when Syrian forces came in (at the Phalange’s request) to impose peace.He returned in 2000 and the same year his politically inexperienced son Pierre stood for and was elected to parliament on an anti-Syrian platform. Pierre Jr became industry minister after the victory of anti-Syrian factions in the elections of 2005, which followed the assassination of popular former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. His death came as the anti-Syria, pro-Western majority in the government was locked in a power struggle with the militant Hezbollah movement and its allies.