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CBC Investigation: Who killed Lebanon's Rafik Hariri? (Report uncoveres UN's evidence of Hezbollah's involvement in Lebonese Prime Minster Hariri assassination)
CBC Investigation: Who killed Lebanon's Rafik Hariri?
4 part story. 2 part video, look for link at bottom of video.
Part 1 2 3 4
Quote:
Part 1:
It wasn't until late 2007 that the awkwardly titled UN International Independent Investigation Commission actually got around to some serious investigating.
By then, nearly three years had passed since the spectacular public murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Hariri, the builder. The billionaire tycoon who'd reclaimed Beirut's architectural heritage from the shattered cityscape of a civil war and made it his mission to restore Lebanon's mercantile leadership.
Hariri, the nationalist who'd had the courage to stand against Syria, Lebanon's longtime occupier; and in his day was the most important reformer in the Middle East.
The massive detonation that killed him on Feb. 14, 2005 unleashed forces no one knew were there. All of Lebanon seemed to rise up in the murder's aftermath, furiously pointing at the country's Syrian overlords.
Who killed Rafik Hariri? His assassination in February 2005 rocked the power arrangements in the Middle East and turned him into an overarching symbol of everything that was wrong in Lebanon. (Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)Who killed Rafik Hariri? His assassination in February 2005 rocked the power arrangements in the Middle East and turned him into an overarching symbol of everything that was wrong in Lebanon. (Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)
The not unreasonable assumption was that Hariri had died for opposing Damascus.
Lebanon's fury quickly accomplished what the assassinated leader had failed to achieve in his lifetime.
The murder gave rise to the so-called Cedar Revolution, a rare Lebanese political consensus. Syria, cowed by the collective anger, withdrew its troops.
At the UN, France and the U.S. pushed the Security Council into dispatching a special investigative commission.
For a time, it actually seemed that Lebanon was moving toward the rule of law and true democracy.
But, by the end of 2007, all that had ebbed. The killers remained uncaught. Syria was gradually reasserting its influence. And assassinations of other prominent Lebanese continued.
In the White House, senior administration officials began to conclude that the UN's famous clay feet were plodding toward nothing.
It turned out they were right.
A months-long CBC investigation, relying on interviews with multiple sources from inside the UN inquiry and some of the commission's own records, found examples of timidity, bureaucratic inertia and incompetence bordering on gross negligence.
Among other things, CBC News has learned that:
* Evidence gathered by Lebanese police and, much later, the UN, points overwhelmingly to the fact that the assassins were from Hezbollah, the militant Party of God that is largely sponsored by Syria and Iran. CBC News has obtained cellphone and other telecommunications evidence that is at the core of the case.
* UN investigators came to believe their inquiry was penetrated early by Hezbollah and that that the commission's lax security likely led to the murder of a young, dedicated Lebanese policeman who had largely cracked the case on his own and was co-operating with the international inquiry.
* UN commission insiders also suspected Hariri's own chief of protocol at the time, a man who now heads Lebanon's intelligence service, of colluding with Hezbollah. But those suspicions, laid out in an extensive internal memo, were not pursued, basically for diplomatic reasons.
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Haartez Article:
Quote:
An investigative report by the Canadian television station CBC has unequivocally concluded that Hezbollah was involved in the 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The report also named one of the suspects fingered by the UN commission investigating the murder: Wissam Hassan, today Lebanon's intelligence chief, who at the time was Hariri's chief of protocol.
Documents obtained by CBC indicate that Hassan has very close ties with senior Hezbollah officials, including Hussein Khalil, one of Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah's top aides.
beirut - AFP - November 23 2010
The report said the UN probe had evidence pointing to Hezbollah's involvement as early as 2006, but initially failed to pursue it. This evidence was supplied by a Lebanese police officer, Capt. Wissam Eid, who was himself assassinated in 2008.
Only in October 2007 did the commission finally order an analysis of Lebanese phone records. Two months later, this analysis produced a list of mobile phone numbers belonging to people apparently involved in the attack, including eight who, based on their cell phone data, had evidently been shadowing Hariri in the weeks before his death.
But it turned out Eid had supplied these same numbers, based on the same analysis, in early 2006 - but was ignored.
These eight phones, dubbed the "red phones," were used only to communicate with each other before the murder, and were never used again after it. But the analysis revealed that each of these eight people also used a second phone to communicate with a larger network, dubbed the "blue group."
Eid had been monitoring the blue group's calls, but his break came when Hezbollah shut down the network and collected the phones. Some of the phones still had time remaining on them, and the man Hezbollah assigned to collect them, a junior electronics specialist named Abd al Majid al Ghamloush, used one to call his girlfriend. That enabled Eid to put a name to him.
Like the red group, blue group members each had a second phone, and Eid also tracked these. His phone monitoring eventually led him to two Hezbollah operatives, brothers Hussein and Mouin Khreis, one of whom had been on the spot when Hariri was killed. It also led him to the "yellow group," which was apparently a longer-term surveillance team.
Finally, he discovered that all the phones he was tracking were linked in some way to landlines at Hezbollah's Great Prophet Hospital, located in a Hezbollah-controlled section of Beirut. Hezbollah has long been thought to have a command center in this hospital.
Later still, the probe discovered the "pink group" - four phones that had communicated both with the hospital and, indirectly, the other networks. All four had been issued by the Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah was part in 2005. The UN commission asked the Lebanese Communications Ministry who owned them, and CBC obtained a copy of the response: Beside each phone number was the word "Hezbollah."
At one point, Eid himself was warned off by Hezbollah. Then, to underscore the message, someone tried to kill his boss, Lt. Col. Samer Shehadeh. Shehadeh survived the September 2006 bombing attack but was severely injured.
In January 2008 - a month after the UN probe had first reproduced Eid's findings and then rediscovered his lost report - it sent its telecommunications experts to talk with him. But on January 25, 2008, the day after their second meeting, Eid was assassinated in a bombing attack identical to the one that killed Hariri. Apparently, Hezbollah had found out about the meetings.
One person the phone records cast particular suspicion on was Hassan, Hariri's former chief of protocol. He was not with Hariri when the assassination occurred, and had told UN investigators this was because he had a university exam later that day and spent the entire morning studying - with his cell phone off.
That alibi made UN investigators suspicious even at the time. But Serge Brammertz, then head of the commission, refused to allow them to investigate further, for political reasons.
The phone records, however, showed that Hassan had in fact made 24 calls that morning, an average of one every nine minutes. They also showed that from late 2004 to the end of 2005, he spoke with Khalil by phone 279 times. During that same period, Khalil had 602 phone conversations with Wafa Safik, head of Hezbollah's internal security department.
Moreover, Hassan became head of ISF - the Lebanese security service for which Eid also worked - after the assassination, and would thus have known about his January 2008 meetings with the UN experts.
But despite all the telecommunications evidence obtained by both Eid and the UN, one problem remains: It is not evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Whether the commission will ever succeed in collecting the necessary supporting evidence remains unknown.
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Aljazeera
Quote:
A United Nations spokesman has expressed concern that the world body special tribunal's investigation into the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, could be influenced by a Canadian media report.
In a report based on leaks, Canadian broadcaster CBC has said that evidence gathered by Lebanese police and later by UN-backed investigators strongly linked the Hezbollah group to the 2005 killing.
Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman commenting on the report on Monday, said "it is a matter of concern that the leaks could have an effect on the substance of the work by the prosecutors and the tribunal itself,"
"Certainly leaks are matters of concern. We want to be able to ensure that the special tribunal on Lebanon can go about its work without hindrance or interference," Haq told reporters.
He would not comment on the details published by CBC. The UN has asked CBC to give information on the documents it obtained "so we can assess them," Haq added.
'Hit squad'
CBC News said on Sunday it had obtained mobile telephone and other telecommunications evidence which is at the core of the case.
It said that in 2007 the investigators asked a British firm to analyse telephone calls made in Lebanon in 2005.
"What the British analyst showed them [the UN investigators] was nothing less than the hit squad that had carried out the murder, or at least the phones they had been carrying at the time," CBC News said.
Hezbollah said on Monday it had no comment on the CBC News report.
The report is close to one published by German magazine Der Spiegel in 2009 in which it cited information it had obtained saying that investigators believed Hezbollah was behind al-Hariri's killing.
The magazine also said Lebanese investigators had found a link between eight mobile phones used in the area at the time of the attack and a network of 20 other phones believed to belong to Hezbollah's "operative arm".
Several media reports have said that the UN tribunal is close to announcing indictments against Hezbollah members for the killing.
Indictments expected
Hezbollah, which is part of a unity government led by al-Hariri's son Saad, has repeatedly denied any involvement in the killing, and has called for a boycott of the tribunal's work.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, has said he will not allow the arrest of any of the group's members.
Lebanese politicians have expressed fears of a new explosion of violence if Hezbollah members are indicted.
Michael Williams, UN special co-ordinator for Lebanon, said last week that he expected indictments to be issued "in the coming months."
Al-Hariri's assassination in a massive explosion in Beirut on February 14, 2005, plunged Lebanon into its worst crisis since the 1975-90 civil war, with Sunni-Shia tensions threatening to boil over into a civil war.
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11-23-2010, 07:23 AM
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