Intelligence gathered by Hezbollah to assist UN body

Calcutta News.Net
Thursday 12th August, 2010

The UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon has called on Lebanese group Hezbollah to provide intelligence it has gathered on the Rafik Hariri assassination.

Hezbollah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah on Monday unveiled surveillance tapes and intelligence on a number of issues which he said implicates Israel in the murder of Hariri, a former Prime Minister of Lebanon, who was killed along with 22 others in a massive bombing in downtown Beirut on February 14 2005.

Nasrallah, addressing a two-hour press confernce to 150 members of the media in Beirut on Monday, beamed surveillance tapes commissioned by Israeli intelligence which showed meticulous coverage of the various routes the Hariri detail travelled on, including the one taken on the day of the assassination. Nasrallah pointed out there were repeated video snapshots of various turns where a motorcade would have to slow down, including one where the February 14 bombing occurred.

While saying the 'evidence' he was putting forward was not proof, Nasrallah said an Israeli involvement in the killing merited investigation.

It appears the Prosecutor of the UN Special Tribunal, Daniel A. Bellemare, agrees.

"On 9 August 2010, during a Press Conference, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Mr. Hassan Nasrallah, offered information to assist the investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri," a statement from the Office of the Prosecutor issued Wednesday said.

"The Office of the Prosecutor has been given the mandate to identify and prosecute those responsible for the attack. It has sole responsibility for the investigation and acts independently. Nobody can influence its direction. As such, it must pursue all possible leads. “I invite anyone who has relevant information to submit it to my office. Indeed, I welcome any information that can bring us closer to the truth. I can assure those who bring this information that it will be thoroughly assessed”, said the prosecutor's office.

Nasrallah's claim of Israel's involvement some media sources say is to distract from claims that militants with links to Hezbollah are about to be indicted by the tribunal.

Those claims are largely based on an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel in May last year which provided detailed information including names, times and dates related to persons suspected of involvement in the killing. As pointed out previously, we believe these claims to be ill-founded. The Spiegel article appeared just weeks after the UN Special Tribunal was set up. The work of the tribunal began on March 1 and initially involved the establishment of the body and recruitment of staff. It would be highly unusual for the investigative tribunal to make the conclusions alluded to by the Spiegel article in such a short space of time. The tribunal is also cautious about naming suspects without having sufficient evidence to indict. Its predecessor, another international UN investigating panel, arrested four Lebanese generals and held them in prison for nearly four years based on "false tesimony," and "acts of forgery," which led to the generals being cleared and released last year.

What has driven Nasrallah to come forward with the claims of Israel's involvement is two-fold. He points out the only party to have benefitted from the assassination has been Israel. It was able to coerce the United States into orchestrating a withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon. Within a little more than a year of the withdrawal Israel launched a major war on Lebanon which killed 1,300 people, mostly Lebanese civilians.

The second driving factor behind the Nasrallah claims has been the huge network of Israeli spies arrested in the past two years by Lebanon. 150 Israeli intelligence agents are facing charges of espionage, many of whom worked in Lebanon's telecom companies. Nasrallah says these spies under interrogation have admitted to Israeli involvement in a number of assassinations that preceded and followed the Hariri murder.

He says much of the evidence gathered by the UN Special Tribunal involves telephone records related to cell phones and suggests these records may have been fabricated to implicate Hezbollah operatives,

Nasrallah on Monday said one Israeli spy was spotted at the site of the Hariri assassination the day before it happened. When authorities tried to track him down he had disappeared.

Another spy, Nasrallah said, admitted Israel had tried to convince Hariri that Hezbollah was planning to assassinate him back in 1997.

What is clear is that following the withdrawal of the Syrian troops and intelligence agents in 2005, Israel infiltrated the country with scores of its own agents. The fact that 150 have been arrested in the past two years points to many more in existence that have avoided detection. It may well be those that are in detention will face questioning by the Hariri investigators.

"In line with its mandate, the Office of the Prosecutor has requested the Lebanese authorities to provide all the information in possession of Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. This request includes the video material that was shown on television during the press conference, as well any other material that would be of assistance to the Office of the Prosecutor in unveiling the truth," Wednesday's statement from the Special Tribunal said

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