U.N. Accuses Syrians in the Assassination of Lebanon’s Hariri
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. investigator, Detlev Mehlis, set the stage yesterday for increased international pressure on Syria,saying there is “converging evidence” that the Baathist regime in Damascus – including President al-Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat – was involved in the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and that there is evidence that Mr. al-Assad himself had threatened Hariri.
The long-awaited Mehlis report, which was distributed to members of the Security Council yesterday evening, determined that both Syria and its allies in Lebanon were complicit in the assassination, but it was the al-Assad regime that drew most of the interest. Some of the top names in the president’s inner circles were implicated by Mr. Mehlis, as was the pro-Syrian Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, who has refused to resign even after an election that swept anti-Syrian politicians into office.
Most of the 15 members of the Security Council were still studying the report at press time. But the report pointedly said that Syria, including Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa, impeded the investigation. By determining that Damascus’s “lack of substantive cooperation with the Commission has impeded the investigation,” Mr. Mehlis’s report is bound to help America and France to overcome the last remaining objections to measures that will further isolate Syria.
“The results are clearly troubling,” a spokesman for the American mission to the United Nations, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun. He added that the Security Council will have to discuss further the measures that should be taken against Syria.
The February 14 blast that killed Hariri and more than 20 others was planned months in advance, according to the Mehlis report, and was “carried out by a group with an extensive organization and considerable resources and capabilities.” According to a host of witnesses, mostly unidentified in the report, those who played an important role in the assassination include Mr. Shawkat, who had helped stage a false televised confession to the assassination that was broadcast on Al Jazeera television, and the commander of the Syrian forces in Lebanon, Rustum Ghazali.
Four Lebanese officials who were implicated in the report have already been arrested by Lebanese officials.Since the beginning of the Mehlis investigation in June, the Lebanese authorities under a newly elected government have been emboldened, taking measures against the remaining Syrian allies and its intelligence operatives in Lebanon. Lebanon has already requested that the mandate of the Mehlis investigation would be extended, and the report yesterday said that leaving an international judicial presence “will considerably boost the trust of the Lebanese people in their security system, while building self-confidence in their capabilities.” Mr. Annan yesterday recommended that the Mehlis team’s mandate be extended at least to December 15.
Secretary General Annan’s special representative, Terje Roed Larsen is expected to hand down a report early next week that will cover the political climate in Lebanon in the aftermath of the assassination. Among the subject he will cover will be armed groups that refuse to lay down their weapons. Mr. Larsen will concentrate on the role of Syria, which has recently increased the flow of arms into Palestinian Arab camps in Lebanon, according to United Nations officials.
In the report, Mr. Mehlis details how months in advance of the assassination, Syrian operators and their Lebanese allies traced Hariri’s steps. One unidentified witness told the investigators that a Syrian officer told him that there “soon would be an ‘earthquake’ that would rewrite the history of Lebanon.”
The commission describes the growing political tensions between Hariri and Damascus in the months leading to the assassination, including a now famous August 26, 2004, meeting in which Mr. Hariri was summoned to Damascus where he met officials including Mr. Assad, who told him that the term in office of President Lahoud would be extended. Testimony of opposition leaders in Lebanon, including Hariri’s son, Saad, was based on what the slain leader told them after that meeting. Mr. Assad threatened Hariri, according to that testimony, saying he planned to “break Lebanon over your head.”
Two weeks before the assassination, according to one witness, General Shawkat, who is married to the Syrian president’s sister, forced a Palestinian Arab named Ahmed Abu Adass to record a videotape in which he had confessed to carrying the crime. The body of Abu Adass was supposed to be found on the site of the bombing, in an attempt to indicate that this was a suicide attack. But the investigation found no traces of his DNA at the scene, and no indication that the terrorist group that he had confessed to represent even existed. “The evidence does show that it is likely that Mr. Abu Adass left his home on 16 January 2005 and was taken, voluntarily or not, to Syria, where he has since disappeared,” the report says.
A Syrian intelligence officer who was a “witness,” and later became a suspect according to the report,told the commission that the driver assigned to the Mitsubishi car carrying 1000 tons of explosives, which was the assassination weapon, was an Iraqi national. He had “been led to believe that the target was Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi,” the report said.
One man that has previously not been described in relation to the assassination is Sheikh Ahmad Abdel-Al, who is described in the report as responsible for public relations, military and intelligence for the Association of Islamic Philanthropic Projects, described in the report as a “Lebanese group with strong historical ties to the Syrian authorities.” No other figure “is as linked to all the various aspects of this investigation” as Mr. Abdel-Al, the report says.
Mr. Abdel-Al’s various mobile phones yielded a host of clues, as according to the investigation he has been in touch with most of the names that later on were suspected to be involved in the assassination. One of Mr. Abdel-Al frequent contacts, his brother, Mahmoud, made a call “minutes before the blast” on February 14 to the mobile phone of President Lahoud, presumably to inform him of the impending assassination.
The report makes no mention of the Syrian interior minister and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, who was found dead in his office last week in what Syrian officials described as a suicide.