A police intelligence officer looking into assassinations in Lebanon was killed in a targeted bomb attack — continuing the cycle of politically motivated murders.

One question now being asked: was Al Qaeda behind the killing? Or could it really be Syria? Or is there a convergence of bloody interests at play there?

Reuters reports:

A car bomb killed a police intelligence officer involved in the investigation of assassinations in Lebanon, in an attack in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Friday.

Police chief Brigadier-General Ashraf Rifi named the officer targeted in the blast while on his way to work as Captain Wisam Eid. A bodyguard and two other people were also killed.

Thirty-eight people were wounded.

Was he getting too close to something?

Eid, 31, worked for an intelligence unit widely viewed as close to anti-Syrian ruling coalition leader Saad al-Hariri and which was frequently criticised by the Syrian-backed opposition.

“Eid had a role in all the files linked to terrorist bombings,” Rifi told reporters at the scene.

The assassination was the latest in a wave of bombings and political killings in Lebanon over the past three years. The turmoil caused by the killings has fuelled the country’s worst political crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

And the unit was working closely with the UN, which has been in the country as a detached set of eyes to look into the murders.

The police intelligence unit has been closely involved in the U.N.-led investigation into the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, and in a crackdown on al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa said Eid, who was a communications engineer, had been targeted before. He took up his post after a roadside bomb wounded his predecessor, Samir Shehadeh, in 2006.

Security sources said Eid was responsible for tracking mobile telephone communications made by attackers in previous assassinations and of Islamist militant cells.

The car packed with at least 50 kg (110 pounds) of explosives was parked on the side of a road near an overpass in the suburb of Hazmiyeh. It was detonated by remote control as Eid’s car drove by, security sources said.

But Time’s Beirut reporter’s article bluntly asks: “Was Al-Qaeda Behind Beirut Bombing?”

As a top Lebanese police investigator into a spate of bomb attacks as well as the activities of al-Qaeda-inspired groups in the country, Captain Wissam Eid had no shortage of potential enemies. One of those foes got to Eid Friday morning, killing him and at least three other people in a powerful car bomb explosion, nearly identical to the attacks he had been investigating.

“We got the message but we will carry on our mission in protecting Lebanon,” said Brigadier General Ashraf Rifi, the head of Lebanon’s paramilitary Internal Security Forces, at the scene of the attack. The 31-year-old Eid ran the technical department of the ISF’s intelligence branch and was a communications specialist.

So who killed Eid? Neighboring Syria seeking to re-impose its grip on Lebanon? Al-Qaeda-related groups attempting to destabilize Lebanon? A combination of the two, perhaps?

According to Time, Al Qaeda is on the hunt for UN investigators:

At the end of December, Osama bin Laden described the U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon as “Crusaders” sent to Lebanon “to protect the Jews” of Israel. On January 7, another taped message was aired on a jihadist website purportedly from Shaker al-Absi, the fugitive leader of the al-Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam group, which waged a bloody three month battle against the Lebanese army last summer. In the 58-minute message, Absi threatened attacks against the Lebanese army. “The mill of war has started to grind … between the infidels and the believers,” he said.

A series of violent bombings and incidents followed after that, the magazine reports.

“Bin Laden’s statement seems to have heralded an al-Qaeda resurgence here,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center in Beirut. “There is a logical correlation between these recent [bomb] incidents and this latest one [Eid’s assassination] related to al-Qaeda activity.”

But other analysts and commentators suspect Syria is to blame, arguing that Eid’s murder fits the pattern of past professionally conducted car bomb assassinations in which Syrian involvement was strongly suspected. Writing in the anti-Syrian Al-Mustaqbal newspaper last week, columnist Fadi Shamieh said that recent attacks in Lebanon suggest a convergence of interests between Syria and some Sunni jihadists operating in Lebanon. “Even if there are no ideological links between these two sides, both are diligently working to create trouble as soon as possible which would serve the interest of the extremists … [and] the objectives of hostile intelligence service,” he wrote.

In other words: more bombings — and deaths — are likely to continue to be pitchforked into the international headlines.