Missing funds mystery stuns Shia community

The leisurely chit-chat over sweet tea that usually follows the iftar , the breaking of the fast every evening during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has been replaced by heated discussions at the home of the mayor of Toura, a hilltop village in south Lebanon.

The topic of conversation is the spectacular bankruptcy and detention of a prominent businessman from the area, who is close to Hizbollah, the powerful Shia militant movement.

Salah Ezzedine, who has been dubbed "the Lebanese Madoff" by the country's media after Bernard Madoff, the convicted US fraudster, may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars of his investors' money. Like countless others among the Shia Muslim community in Lebanon and in the Gulf, many people in Toura have lost their life savings.