Guilty verdict over murder of former leader
LEIDSCHENDAM, Netherlands — A U.N.backed tribunal on Tuesday convicted one member of the Hezbollah militant group and acquitted three others of involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri 15 years ago.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon said Salim Ayyash was guilty as a coconspirator of five charges linked to his involvement in the suicide truck bombing. Hariri and 21 others were killed and 226 were wounded in a huge blast outside a seaside hotel in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.
However, after a yearslong investigation and trial, three other Hezbollah members were acquitted of all charges that they also were involved in the killing of Hariri, which sent shock waves through the Middle East.
None of the suspects were ever arrested and were not in court to hear the verdicts.
The tribunal’s judges also said there was no evidence the leadership of the Hezbollah militant group and Syria were involved in the attack, despite saying the assassination happened as Hariri and his political allies were discussing calling for an “immediate and total withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon,” Presiding Judge David Re said.
The verdict was met with disappointment in Beirut.
“I am very angry,” said Sami Kara, a Hariri supporter, complaining that after 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the tribunal, it turned out “that one person carried out such a huge crime.”
That money, he said, should have been spent on building power stations in Lebanon, where electricity cuts are common.
When launched in the wake of the attack, the Hariri tribunal raised hopes that for the first time in multiple instances of political violence in Lebanon, the truth would emerge and the perpetrators would be held to account.
But for many in Lebanon, the tribunal failed on both counts. Many of the suspects, including the man convicted Tuesday, are either dead or out of the reach of justice. And the prosecution was unable to present a cohesive picture of the bombing plot or who ordered it.
The verdicts came at a particularly sensitive time for Lebanon, following the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut two weeks ago, and as many in Lebanon are calling for an international investigation into that explosion.
But it was doubtful the verdict, coming 15 years after the assassination and with no defendants in court, would bring closure to those who had been waiting for justice.
Hariri’s son Saad, himself a former Lebanese premier, told journalists outside the court building that the family accepts the verdicts, though he acknowledged that “everybody’s expectation was much higher than what came out.”
The scale of the investigation was apparent from the size of the written judgment. Re said it ran to more than 2,600 pages with some 13,000 footnotes.
Hariri was Lebanon’s most prominent Sunni politician at the time of his assassination, while Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim group backed and funded by Tehran.