Hizballah members of Lebanon’s Parliament are issuing threats, as Prime Minister Siniora moves forward with the investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri.

BEIRUT (AFP) - Powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah has warned that Lebanon risked plunging into a “dark tunnel” after the pro-Western cabinet pressed ahead with a controversial emergency session against the objections of pro-Syrians within the regime.

Saturday’s meeting of the 17 anti-Syrian ministers who remain after the withdrawal of six pro-Syrian colleagues two weeks ago was dismissed as unconstitutional by both parliament speaker Nabih Berri and President Emile Lahoud.

Prime Minister Fuad Siniora called the meeting to take the next step in the ratification of an international court into ex-premier Rafiq Hariri’s 2005 murder amid outrage over Tuesday’s killing of anti-Syrian cabinet colleague Pierre Gemayel.

“Mr Siniora knows very well the constitutional procedures which should be respected,” said Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah Sunday, referring to charges that only the president had the authority to approve an emergency cabinet meeting. “And what he is doing is a blatant violation of the constitution, either by calling on his political grouping for a meeting, or by adopting unconstitutional decisions,” he said referring derisively to Saturday’s meeting of the rump cabinet.

MPs of the militant group, which fought a devastating summer war with Israel, said they were ready to give the prime minister a little longer to return to the power-sharing arrangements that have been respected since the 1975-90 civil war before taking action. They said the anti-government factions would wait until the end of the customary mourning period for Gemayel next Thursday before pressing ahead with their threatened campaign of street protests for a national unity government that they had postponed after Gemayel’s murder.

“The ruling majority has a chance until the mourning period ends, and it should seize that opportunity, or else they will get themselves into a dark tunnel,” warned the head of the Hezbollah parliamentary bloc, Mohammed Raad. “So we will wait for a few days. But we are still determined to carry out the actions that we had planned when the mourning period ends.”