Syria's ruling Baath party said Sunday it had expelled former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam, who has implicated the regime in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.
The party, which has ruled Syria with an iron grip since 1963, described Khaddam's comments to Dubai-based satellite channel Al-Arabiya from his base in exile in Paris as a "slander which violates the principles of the nation".
"The national leadership has decided to throw Khaddam out of the party. It considers him a traitor. Khaddam has betrayed the party, the homeland and the (Arab) nation," the party leadership said in a statement carried by the official SANA news agency.
Members of Syria's loyalist parliament had earlier called for Khaddam to be tried for treason for his bombshell, the first time in the regime's history such a high-ranking official had turned whistleblower.
"We appeal to Justice Minister Mohammed Ghafri to bring Abdel Halim Khaddam before justice for high treason and to take the necessary measures," the legislature's speaker Mahmud al-Abrash said on Saturday.
Parliament unanimously passed a motion calling for a trial during a regular session in which several MPs accused Khaddam of "treason" and "corruption" for his remarks, which dealt a new blow to Assad's regime.
"I demand, in my own name and the name of the people, that Khaddam be judged because he has attacked the dignity of Syria and humiliated millions of Syrians," said MP Umeima Khudur.
Khaddam, long the architect of Syria's military and political domination of neighbouring Lebanon, made his explosive accusations in an interview broadcast by Al-Arabiya on Friday.
"I will destroy anyone who tries to hinder our decisions," Khaddam quoted Assad as telling Hariri during a meeting in Damascamily now live, said the meeting took place a few months before the February 14 assassination of Hariri in a Beirut bomb blast for which a UN probe has implicated Syrian intelligence.
"We must await the results of the investigation, but no Syrian security service could take such a decision unilaterally," Khaddam said.
In an interview with CNN in October, Assad vehemently rejected any notion he had played a personal role in the Hariri assassination.
The murder of Hariri, a billionaire businessman and five-time prime minister, plunged Lebanon into political turmoil and heightened international pressure on Syria to end its 29-year military presence in its smaller neighbour last April.
"The battle of Damascus, the battle of the regime has begun," predicted a Lebanese MP from the anti-Syrian majority who asked not to be named, while pro-Damascus newspaper Ad-Diyar branded Khaddam "Syria's Judas."