Prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Daniel Bellemare has published an indictment alleging the involvement of Hizbullah supporters in the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri in 2005, writes Lucy Fielder After months of leaks, when the findings finally came they caused little surprise. On 17 August, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), sitting in The Hague, published its first indictment in its investigation of the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri in 2005 and allowed this divided country to pore over evidence presented against the four men named, all of whom are believed to be linked to the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah. Al-Hariri and 21 others were killed when his convoy was blown up on Beirut's seafront in an assassination that plunged Lebanon into turmoil, splitting it into a pro-Western camp that initially accused Syria of the killing, and Hizbullah, which is backed by Syria and Iran. Some sensitive details were blacked out of the indictment, and it alluded to further evidence and witness testimony without giving details. Otherwise, the evidence was, as STL prosecutor Daniel Bellemare acknowledged in his report, largely circumstantial, being based on telecommunications data. It is unlikely to change the opinions of either the Tribunal's supporters or its critics. Arrest warrants were handed over to Lebanon's judiciary in late July, and the government, dominated by Hizbullah's 8 March Alliance, was given 30 days to report back to the STL on progress in tracking down the men. As expected, the Lebanese government reported that it had not apprehended the four suspects. Hizbullah far outguns the Lebanese army and police, even if they were inclined to seek out the men. Hizbullah has repeatedly said that it will not work with the STL, a body it sees as being devoid of legitimacy and part of a plot cooked up against it by Israel and the United States. Saad Al-Hariri, son of the former prime minister and head of the Lebanese government until early this year, called on Hizbullah to hand over the suspects, highlighting the ever-deepening rifts between the country's two camps in their relations to the STL. In the STL indictment, the four men, Mustafa Badreddin, Salim Jamil Ayyash, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hassan Sabra, are described as being Hizbullah supporters, and the group's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah appeared to confirm their links to the group in a speech he made on the evening the indictment was published, in which he reiterated accusations that the UN Tribunal was politicised. "These honourable members of the resistance should not even be described as accused," Nasrallah said, adding that the STL was bent on sowing strife between Lebanon's Shia and Sunni communities, of which Al-Hariri was a member. Of the four men named, Badreddin is the most high-profile, and he is believed to be the brother-in-law of Imad Mughnieh, a Hizbullah military leader who was assassinated in Damascus in 2008. All four men are charged with conspiracy aimed at committing a terrorist act. Badreddin and Ayyash are also charged with committing the intentional homicide of Al-Hariri and 21 others in 2005. The STL indictment describes Badreddine as having had overall control of the operation and Ayyash of coordinating the assassination. Oneissi and Sabra, described as co-conspirators, are accused of making false claims of responsibility and leading news agencies astray. The report by Bellemare gives extensive details of the four men's alleged use of five mobile phones, two of which were activated in the four months prior to the assassination and used to track Al-Hariri's movements and coordinate the attack. The report said that the phones were subsequently immediately deactivated, and it identifies the users of the mobiles through their use of the lines and of their personal phones in the same area at the same time. Set up in The Hague in 2009, the Tribunal is the first United Nations court to try a terrorist case. Beirut-based expert on Hizbullah Amal Saad-Ghorayeb said that the indictment's reference to the military wing of Hizbullah as having been implicated in acts of terrorism in the past would do little to assuage the fears of critics of the Tribunal. No international investigation has ever concluded that Hizbullah in fact carried out acts often attributed to it by the United States, such as the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. While the US state department has designated Hizbullah as a terrorist organisation, the European Union and many other countries have not. Another criticism Hizbullah and the Tribunal's detractors have leveled at the indictment is its reliance on telecommunications data, which telecoms experts say can be faked. Such experts have drawn a link between the STL report and the discovery by Lebanese internal forces of alleged Israeli spies in the country's telecoms system. Some of these have now been jailed, including a senior executive from one of Lebanon's two mobile providers, Alfa. Hizbullah has long alleged that Israel's penetration of Lebanon's mobile phone network renders any such evidence null and void. From a purely strategic point of view, Saad-Ghorayeb also cast doubt on the likelihood of Hizbullah operatives using mobile phones to execute such an assassination. There was a "striking discrepancy," she said, between the sophisticated means Hizbullah used to communicate with its fighters during the 2006 war with Israel and the tactics described in the STL report. Hizbullah is believed to use an extensive and private fixed-line network in its strongholds in the south and east of the country. The importance it places on this network was highlighted in May 2008, when the Lebanese government, then dominated by the group's critics and backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, moved to close it down. Hizbullah and its allies immediately reacted militarily, seizing parts of Beirut and the interior and forcing the government to rescind the decision. Many in Lebanon have long feared that the STL's work could stir instability and Sunni-Shia strife in the country. However, for the moment calm has reigned, in part due to a year of media leaks before the publication of the indictment and a pre-emptive Hizbullah media campaign, both of which prepared the public for the report's findings and took the sting out of them.
