FN-tribunalet som etterforsker drapet på Libanons tidligere statsminister Rafik Haririi skal ha kommet til at det ikke var Syria, men Hizbollah som sto bak attentat der i alt 23 mennesker ble drept. Det skriver Spiegel i sin nettutgave.

Hariri og hans kortesje ble sprengt i luften 14. februar 2005, og attentatet fikk store politiske ringvirkninger. Hariri var en god venn av Saudi-Arabia.

Det har vært to spesialetterforskere, tyske Detlev Mehlis, og belgiske Serge Brammertz. De fant bevis på at syrisk etterretning og libanesere sto bak og fire hovedmistenkte ble arrestert. Men man skal aldri ha funnet det avgjørende bevis for syrisk delaktighet.

Den 1. mars 2009 begynte det nye tribunalet å arbeide.

The establishment of a UN special tribunal was intended to provide certainty. It began its work on March 1, 2009. The tribunal, headquartered in the town of Leidschendam in the Netherlands, has a budget of more than €40 million ($56 million) for the first year alone, with the UN paying 51 percent and Beirut 49 percent of the cost. It has an initial mandate for three years, and the most severe sentence it can impose is life in prison. Canadian Daniel Bellemare, 57, was appointed to head the tribunal. Four of the 11 judges are Lebanese, whose identities have been kept secret, for security reasons.

Det første de gjorde var å løslate de fire som har sittet tre år i fengsel.

Der Spiegels artikkel er noe snodig. Bladet hevder å sitte på gode kilder som beviser at Hizbollah sto bak, og spør hvorfor domstolen ikke går ut offentlig. Det kan virke som om bladet spiller en rolle, og blir brukt av noen.

Storyen er likevel interessant.

According to the detailed information provided by the SPIEGEL source, the fact that the case may have been «cracked» is the result of a mixture of serendipity à la Sherlock Holmes and the state-of-the-art technology used by cyber detectives. In months of painstaking work, a secretly operating special unit of the Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area surrounding Hariri on the days leading up to the attack and on the date of the murder itself. The investigators referred to these mobile phones as the «first circle of hell.»

Captain Eid’s team eventually identified eight mobile phones, all of which had been purchased on the same day in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They were activated six weeks before the assassination, and they were used exclusively for communication among their users and — with the exception of one case — were no longer used after the attack. They were apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack.

But there was also a «second circle of hell,» a network of about 20 mobile phones that were identified as being in proximity to the first eight phones noticeably often. According to the Lebanese security forces, all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the «operational arm» of Hezbollah, which maintains a militia in Lebanon that is more powerful than the regular Lebanese army. While part of the Party of God acts like a normal political organization, participating in democratic elections and appointing cabinet ministers, the other part uses less savory tactics, such as abductions near the Israeli border and terrorist attacks, such those committed against Jewish facilities in South America in 2002 and 2004.

The whereabouts of the two Beirut groups of mobile phone users coincided again and again, and they were sometimes located near the site of the attack. The romantic attachment of one of the terrorists led the cyber-detectives directly to one of the main suspects. He committed the unbelievable indiscretion of calling his girlfriend from one of the «hot» phones. It only happened once, but it was enough to identify the man. He is believed to be Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, from the town of Rumin, a Hezbollah member who had completed training course in Iran. Ghamlush was also identified as the buyer of the mobile phones. He has since disappeared, and perhaps is no longer alive.

Kommandokjede

Ghamlush’s recklessness led investigators to the man they now suspect was the mastermind of the terrorist attack: Hajj Salim, 45. A southern Lebanese from Nabatiyah, Salim is considered to be the commander of the «military» wing of Hezbollah and lives in South Beirut, a Shiite stronghold. Salim’s secret «Special Operational Unit» reports directly to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, 48.

Mannen som identifiserte Hizbollah-telefonene, offiser Eid, opplevde ikke å se fruktene av sitt arbeid.

The Lebanese chief investigator and true hero of the story didn’t live to witness many of the recent successes in the investigation. Captain Eid, 31, was killed in a terrorist attack in the Beirut suburb of Hasmiyah on Jan. 25, 2008. The attack, in which three other people were also killed, was apparently intended to slow down the investigation. And, once again, there was evidence of involvement by the Hezbollah commando unit, just as there has been in each of more than a dozen attacks against prominent Lebanese in the last four years.

Hvis domstolen går ut med avsløringene kan det svekke Hizbollah foran valget 7. juni. Men Spiegel gir ikke noe overbevisende svar på hvorfor Hizbollah ønsket Hariri død. Hvis det stemmer at Iran står bak, vil det øke spenningene mellom sunni-stater og shiaer.

New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder