The Daily Star, which until 2006 was distributed throughout the Middle East alongside the International Herald Tribune, has been in trouble for years. But nobody expected such an abrupt fall for the Lebanon-based daily.

One morning last week, without any notice, the Daily Star was not available on newsstands. It has not been published since,and the website has not been updated.

The shutdown was ordered by a court after months of negotiations with a Lebanese bank over debt amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, the newspaper's publisher and editor in chief, Jamil Mroue, told The Times. There were no indications that the sometimes-controversial paper was closed because it broke a taboo or offended a politician, as sometimes occurs in the Middle East.

Mroue said that he had been discussing his financial troubles with the bank for months and was taken aback by the swiftness with which the court stepped in and ordered the newspaper to fold because of its unpaid debts. The newspaper offices were sealed off within an hour of the ruling, he said.

On-and-off for decades, the Daily Star had been a unique English-language source of information in the Arab world. In the last few years, however, a flurry of news websites began challenging the newspaper's once-absolute reign.

The Daily Star's fate is also a symptom of the tough business environment for independent newspapers in the Middle East. Most news publications depend on generous contributions from wealthy political figures or parties. Others are owned by political groups or government agencies and reflect their benefactors' views.

Newspapers such as the Daily Star, where opinion pieces by neoconservatives run side-by-side with articles by radical Islamists, struggle to cover expenses by selling advertisements.

Mroue said Lebanon had suffered through nearly four years of assassinations, political intrigue and wars, which hurt the newspaper's revenue. He complained that these factors were not taken into account by bank officials judging the company's solvency.

The newspaper's staff members said they were shocked when security officials suddenly showed up Jan. 15, the day after the last issue hit the newsstands, and ordered them to leave immediately. They said they were not even allowed to remove their personal laptop computers.

"At a time when the whole world is seeking information on the Middle East, it will be a real shame not to have an English-language newspaper out of Lebanon," one reporter said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Daily Star was founded in 1952 by Kamel Mroue, a leading Lebanese intellectual who was assassinated in the 1960s. The newspaper first stopped publishing in 1977 because of the start of the civil war in Lebanon, though it resumed briefly in 1984.

Believing in the economic revival of the country, Jamil Mroue decided to resurrect his father's newspaper in 1995. It expanded regionally, publishing editions in Egypt, Qatar and Kuwait. But all were curtailed in recent years after the financial blow of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Mroue has appealed the initial ruling and is waiting for the court's judgment, which is expected in few days. Meanwhile, he said he is looking for potential investors.