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Rafik Hariri assassination: trial of Hezbollah suspects to begin Rafik Hariri assassination: trial of Hezbollah suspects begins
(about 2 hours later)
Nearly nine years after a truck bomb killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others, the trial of four Hezbollah suspects accused of plotting the sectarian assassination is to get under way on Thursday. Almost nine years after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the trial of his alleged killers has started in The Hague.
Uniquely in modern international law, the UN's Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), housed in a former spy agency headquarters on the outskirts of The Hague, is trying the suspects in their absence because the Shia militia Hezbollah has vowed never to arrest them. The defendants, all members of the powerful militia Hezbollah, are being tried in absentia – the first time this has happened at an international trial since the Nuremberg prosecutions.
The STL issued arrest warrants against Mustafa Badreddine, 52, Salim Ayyash, 50, Hussein Oneissi, 39, and Assad Sabra, 37, in 2011. The trial at the UN's Special Tribunal for Lebanon comes as Lebanon continues to reel from instability caused by the 2005 killing and as a combustible political climate cripples the region.
The suicide assassination with a tonne of explosives on 14 February 2005 was one of the most dramatic in the Middle East's modern history, fuelling sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Violence between members of the two sects has claimed the lives of thousands in recent years, mostly in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Lebanon. Victims of the attack, which killed Hariri and 22 others and wounded several hundred more, have said they are expecting accountability from the process – a rare thing in Lebanon where assassinations have long been part of the political fabric, with perpetrators rarely caught.
Prosecutor Norman Farrell laid out a case against the four accused – Salim Ayyash, Mustafa Badredine, Hussein Onessi and Assad Sabra – who neither Lebanese authorities, nor members of the STL investigative team have been able to locate since the international body was established by UN statute five years ago.
He said the case against the accused would be anchored by communications evidence that "presents a blueprint of how the crime was carried out and by whom".
Farrell claimed that Hariri had been under surveillance "every minute" that he had been in the country from the end of December 2004 until his death in Beirut at 12.55pm on 14 February 2005.
He said the bomb that killed him and obliterated much of his convoy was comprised of an "extraordinary quantity of high grade explosives. Clearly their aim was not only to make sure the target was killed but to send a terrifying message to the people of Beirut and of Lebanon."
Hariri had been a popular prime minister of post-civil war Lebanon, credited with rebuilding the central area of the capital, Beirut, and with trying to instil sovereignty in state institutions. He had broad cross-sectarian appeal and was vocal in his criticism of Syria's ongoing influence in Lebanon, which had been a spillover from the war years. In the months before his death, he had supported a UN resolution calling on Syrian forces to leave the country.
Farrell alleged that Salim Ayyash "was on the ground leading the team carrying out the final acts in preparation for the attack. Ayyash organised and co-ordinated the physical surveillance of the attack."
Hariri's son Saad, who was ousted as Lebanon's prime minister in January 2011, travelled to The Hague for the trial's opening session. One of his chief advisers, Mohammed Chatah, was killed in a similar explosion in Beirut last month. An investigator responsible for the Lebanese end of the international investigation into the 2005 killing was also killed by a car bomb in late 2012.
Hezbollah has vehemently denied carrying out the attack. It describes the trial as a US and Israeli plot aimed at discrediting the group.
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