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Lebanon indictment shock over telco claims
Calcutta News.Net
Thursday 18th August, 2011
The UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon admits evidence it has gathered to indict four men over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is largely circumstantial.
In an indictment unsealed on Thursday on the orders of Pre-Trial Judge Daniel Fransen, the tribunal’s prosecutor Daniel Bellemare says “The case against the accused is built in large part on circumstantial evidence.” The prosecutor goes on to say circumstantial evidence is “often more reliable,” than direct evidence. The 47-page indictment however asserts the evidence was almost entirely garnered from telephone records, with the tribunal drawing conclusions as to the patterns of calls.
In accusing four men of the murder of 22 people (Hariri and 21 others) and the attempted murder of 231 (those injured in the blast), the special prosecutor has relied almost entirely on the phone records of approximately 30 cell phones which he says the four accused men used, with each of them handling up to 8 different phones each.
Some major gaps in the evidence include the fact that there is no link between the phones allegedly used to orchestrate the assassination, including the lead-up and surveillance over the prior three months, and those charged. How they came to be in possession of the phones, or the sim cards used, is not explained.
The special prosecutor has not outlined what he believes the motivation of the four men was to kill Hariri, or whom they may have been working with. The indictment does point out all four have an association with Hezbollah but it falls far short of implicating the militant group in the assassination. It does say however that others were involved, but admits none have been identified.
For an international court indictment that has followed seven years of evidence gathering by three different bodies it is somewhat surprising in its conclusions. For example a particular phone being used on January 11 2005 near the car sales yard that sold the truck allegedly used in the plot on January 25 2005, has seemingly led the prosecutor to conclude the pair using the phones had purchased the truck. Another section reveals how phones used in the vicinity of a mosque where a 22-year old Palestinian man Ahmad Abu Adass prayed led the prosecutor to conclude two of the men were the ones to persuade Abu Adass to make a video falsely claiming a fictitious group was behind the slaying. The video was passed to al-Jazeera on the day of the bombing.
Abu Adass has not been questioned by members of the Special Tribunal, as he has been missing since January 16 2005.
Incredibly the indictment has been issued without any of the four accused being questioned either. It is unlikely they will appear in court, resisting calls by the Special Tribunal for them to take part. The men named in the indictment are Mustafa Amine Badreddine, Salim Jamil Ayyash, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hasan Sabra.
Bellemare says Badreddine “served as the overall controller of the operation.” Ayyash “coordinated the assassination team, which was responsible for the physical preparation of the attack,” while Oneissi and Sabra “had the task of preparing the false claim of responsibility, which served to identify the wrong people to investigate, in order to shield the conspirators from justice.”
There is little in the indictment to understand how these claims have been made. Bellemare admits the whole story is yet to be known and believes that it will unfold in court.
Initial media reaction to the release of the indictment has been largely unequivocal given the protracted nature of the inquiry and the ramifications of the trial now proceeding for Lebanon.
It is difficult to understand how the media has overlooked the events of the past two years or so in Lebanon which in the light of this indictment should be gaining far more prominence than they did at the time, although even then what unfolded in most parts of the world was treated with a yawn. In Lebanon however there was fury.
Whether the Lebanese themselves appreciate the implications is a mute factor.
Nonetheless it would be remiss not to mention the matters to which we are referring.
In 2009 Lebanon’s security forces launched a sweeping crackdown which has extended well into this year, which has led to the capture of more than 100 spies allegedly acting for Israel. A large number of these people were working in Lebanon’s telecommunications industry, principally in the country’s three major cell phone networks, where almost all the evidence to indict those now charged has originated from.
Charbel Qazzi, for example, a telecom engineer with Alfa, the state-owned mobile telecom company, was arrested by Lebansese security in June last year on suspicion of spying for Israel.
On July 16 last year AFP carried a report saying that Lebanon had arrested “a third person in a widening probe into “a suspected network of Israeli spies employed in the country's telecom sector,” quoting a source close to the investigation.
"The suspect is a former employee in Lebanon's telecommunications sector," the source told AFP.
“The high-profile arrest of Charbel Azzi, a technician at Alfa, last month sparked government concern over the security of Lebanon's telecom sector,” the AFP report said.
Tarek al-Rabaa, also an employee at Alfa, was arrested and is suspected of collaborating with Azzi, the source told AFP.
Telecommunications Minister Charbel Nahas was quoted by AFP as saying the government had taken measures to protect the mobile phone network and described the suspected spying operations as "dangerous."
"We are facing the most dangerous case of espionage" since the crackdown was launched on spy rings in Lebanon in April 2009, the As-Safir newspaper quoted Nahas as saying.
"We are trying to verify if (this espionage) managed to introduce viruses" to the mobile phone network, he said.
Nahas told the newspaper that the authorities had taken steps to change passwords in order to prevent anyone from accessing the system from outside.
A fourth telecom engineer was arrested also in July last year but escaped in two days and fled to Israel. He was one of six people under suspicion of spying for Israel to flee Lebanon at the time, according to Lebanon's Ad-Diyar newspaper. The publication also reported that four engineers at Lebanon cell phone companies had “disappeared.”
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in July last year called for the death penalty for all those arrested as spies if it was proved their collaboration with Israel had resulted in civilian deaths. Nasrallah also took aim at the Jewish state’s influence over Lebanon’s telecommunications. “It has become clear without a shadow of a doubt that Israel completely controls all telecommunication networks in Lebanon,” he said in a report carried by Israel National News (Arutz Sheva).
"When the Israelis waged the war in 2006, they believed that everything related to the Telecoms was under their control. Israel did not attack the mobile phone operating companies because it controls them and it was shocked at the strength of Hezbollah’s leadership correlation,” Nasrallah said.
A report published by the Lebanese Ad-Diyar newspaper on August 24 last year said a telco engineer identified by his initials as T. B., was nabbed in a raid on his house in Mansourieh, north Metn, quoting the Naharnet news portal.
Four months later, in December, an even more senior telco engineer, Tareq Raba'a, was captured. He had reportedly worked at Alfa since 1996, and began working for Israeli intelligence in 2001. He would leave Lebanon twice a month, and bring back at least $10,000 every time, Reuters reported.
Another alleged Israeli spy, Ali Manstash, a Lebanese citizen, was sentenced to death in December for spying for Israel during the 2006 summer war, according to The Jerusalem Post. Manstash was convicted of giving Israel locations of military and civilian targets bombed during the war and resulting in deaths. It has previously been reported that Israel tapped into Lebanon’s mobile phone networks to track down targets during the hostilities.
In May this year the Lebanese Army took control of a Telecommunications Ministry building, a day after some 400 heavily-equipped members of the Lebanese police force raided the facility.
“A Lebanese Army unit took control of securing the second floor of the telecoms building in Beirut's Adlieh district and imposing security in the area,” the Daily Star reported, quoting a statement released by the army command.
According to Major General Ashraf Rifi from Lebanon's police force, also known as the Internal Security Forces (ISF), an “agreement” was reached for the transfer of control.
Lebanon is a powder keg. The Hariri assassination destabilized the country. Within days of it happening on February 14 2005 the U.S. and other Western countries called for the immediate withdrawal of all Syrian military and intelligence personnel. Within months this came to pass. Then in 2006 Israel launched its war on Lebanon destroying much of the country’s infrastructure and killing around 1,400 people.
The revelation now that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is basing its charges of four men based almost entirely on mobile phone records, which it concedes is “largely circumstantial,” is unlikely to relieve the tensions in Lebanon over this affair particularly in the midst of the rounding up the Israeli spies, many whom were engaged in the telecommunications industry. This after the first prosecutor for the tribunal made very public claims that Syria was behind the assassination and even imprisoned a number of army generals for several years on suspicion of being involved – only to see them released some years later.
The four currently charged are said to have orchestrated and carried out the attack. Quite a feat to bring about the detonation of explosives of approximately 2,500 kilogrammes of TNT equivalent, in the heart of Beirut in the middle of the day without any of the intelligence services operating in the country, or the Lebanon security forces, knowing anything about it.
Indeed a feat if the telecommunications services were unable to detect some three months of communications planning a world-scale terrorist attack. And what of the international intelligence agencies and their intensive satelite surveillance of cell phone conversations - how did they all miss it? Or did they?
Unfortunately for the Special Tribunal it has had to deal with the fact that for the first few years of its life it had only fabricated evidence to go on, and the implication of certain suspects by informants that were subsequently found to have lied. What was needed was hard evidence to restore faith in the work of the tribunal. To come up now, at this very late stage, with an indictment based on phone records from companies Lebanon has established have been largely infiltrated by Israel's spy agencies, and to start the detailing of the indictment with an admission the evidence is highly circumstantial, is hardly likely to attract confidence. Unless the mainstream media suddenly finds it has a responsibility to scrutinise the events to date, it may yet however get away with it.
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