LEBANON Shot, a group of police officers assaulted a bank to demand salaries

A group of police officers, as has happened before with private citizens, broke into an institution to demand payment of their salaries. Behind the assaults is the freezing of current accounts, the economic crisis and the collapse of the local currency, which yesterday registered a new all-time low. Since 2019 it has lost almost 90% of its value.

Beirut () – The economic crisis, the freezing of current bank accounts and the progressive depreciation of the local currency, which registered a new negative record yesterday, are pushing a growing number of Lebanese to the threshold of poverty and despair. That is why some decide to assault credit institutions, to try to recover part of their assets. These are increasingly frequent cases in recent times and yesterday they involved a group of policemen from Tire, in the south of the country, who attacked a local branch of the Bank of Lebanon demanding payment of their salaries.

Yesterday the country experienced a new day of protests and the lira reached a new all-time low, which further fueled the discontent of the population. According to reports from the National News Agency, this time, ordinary citizens were also joined by a group of policemen – equally frustrated by the non-payment of their monthly salary – who attacked a bank branch in an attempt to recover the money owed to them. .

In the last year, the country of cedars has experienced an escalation of armed robberies and assaults on banking entities. The economic collapse and restricted access to accounts has exasperated the entire population, and widespread corruption, capital controls, devaluation of local currency, and non-payment of the dollar portion of public employee salaries continue to fuel the crisis.

Since economic problems began to precipitate in 2019, moreover, the Lebanese pound has lost almost 90% of its value, prompting some citizens to rob and burn banks. These responded at the beginning of the month by closing their doors and only reopened them last week. In the spotlight is the president of the Central Bank, Riad Salameh, himself accused of corruption and misappropriation of millionaire capital, which is even being investigated in France and Switzerland.

A judicial source quoted by L’Orient Today reported that an “investigation” will be opened shortly against him, in an attempt to safeguard the “rights” of the Lebanese State over the assets that would have been -according to the prosecution- unduly stolen by the senior official, although for the moment no further details are known and the investigators claim the summary secrecy.

In recent days, the Swiss daily SonntagsZeitung accused Salameh of pocketing more than $500 million deposited in at least 12 Swiss banking institutions. Last year he had already been accused of embezzlement, but the investigation never led to an interrogation and the suspect always denied the charges against him.