The day started with a gathering at Koreitem, Hariri's hillside mansion, which has been an open house for mourners since the assassination. Thousands of marchers lined up outside, while inside, people prayed over his flag-draped coffin. A group of men, including Hariri's sons and key members of the opposition, struggled to carry the coffin from the large salon amid the crush of people.
The cortege made its way through empty streets on the second of three days of official mourning. Koranic verses rang from minarets, drowned out at times by angry chanting from those in the procession. Much of the chanting was directed against Syria.
A banner expresses a common sentiment among mourners at the funeral of Rafiq Hariri, who was killed Monday.
(Jamal Saidi -- Reuters)
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_____Live Discussion_____
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Transcript: Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Nora Boustany on the political situation in Lebanon.
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_____From Beirut_____
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Photo Gallery: Thousands marched through Beirut to mourn the loss of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
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Video: Hariri's funeral becomes an anti-Syria rally in the streets of Beirut.
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Video: Scene from downtown Beirut immediately following the blast.
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A few former cabinet ministers filtered through the crowd, but none from the current government. Opposition leaders had warned that government officials would not be welcome.
The United States was represented by Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns, the senior U.S. diplomat for the Middle East. He told reporters that Hariri's death "must give renewed impetus to achieving a free, independent and sovereign Lebanon" and called on Syria to remove its troops immediately.
Filing down the hill toward Martyrs Square, at the heart of the postwar renovation of downtown Beirut that Hariri spearheaded, the marchers surged through tens of thousands of people already gathered in front of the mosque. Hariri's picture was plastered on shuttered storefronts and car windshields along the parade route.
Young men with the flags of a Christian nationalist party and the Druze party led by Walid Jumblatt, the face of Lebanese opposition to Syria, climbed scaffolding along one minaret and waved the banners until loudspeakers boomed with orders not to do so. Some obeyed, others did not, throughout an event that had the feeling of a resistance march as much as a burial service.
People in baseball caps and red-checked kaffiyehs, scarves and clerical vestments marched side by side. Well-groomed women with eyes filled with tears led chants: "There is no god but God. Hariri is beloved of God." Admonitions to move back so the coffin could pass into the mosque had little effect on the eddy of grieving people who wanted to get near it and for a few minutes prevented Hariri's body from being lowered into the ground.
"We have all come to say something to the world," said Sylvia Kayrouz, 38, an Armenian Christian who expressed amazement at the spectacle. "Christians, Druze, Sunnis -- all of them here. I've never seen anything like it."
