Court: Hezbollah leadership not linked to murder
LEIDSCHENDAM: Judges at a Un-backed tribunal said on Tuesday that there was no evidence that the leadership of the Hezbollah militant group or Syria were involved in the 2005 suicide truck bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Presiding judge David Re of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon said in the months before his death, Hariri supported reducing the influence of Syria in Lebanon and that of Hezbollah in Syria.
He said judges who studied reams of evidence in the trial of four Hezbollah members accused of involvement in the bombing were “of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr Hariri, and some of his political allies”.
But he added that there was no evidence that “Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr Hariri’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it”.
Re was speaking as he delivered the final judgments in the trial. The court was not expected to rule on either Hezbollah or Syria as the tribunal can only accuse individuals, not groups or states.
The verdicts were delayed by nearly two weeks as a mark of respect for victims of another devastating explosion - the detonation of nearly 3,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at Beirut’s port. The August 4 blast killed around 180 people, injured more than 6,000, left a quarter of a million with homes unfit to live in and plunged a nation already reeling from economic and social malaise even deeper into crisis.
Guilty verdicts could compound tensions in the country. Hariri was Lebanon’s most prominent Sunni politician at the time of his February 14, 2005, assassination, while the Iran-backed Hezbollah is a Shia group.
The trial centred on the alleged roles of four Hezbollah members in the suicide truck bombing that killed Hariri and 21 others and wounded 226 people. Prosecutors based their case largely on data from mobile phones allegedly used by the plotters to plan and execute the bombing.