Tue 18 August 2020:
More than 15 years after the truck bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, a U.N.-backed tribunal in the Netherlands is announcing verdicts on Tuesday in the trial of four members of the militant group Hezbollah allegedly involved in the killing, which deeply divided the tiny country.
Four members of Iran-backed militia and political party Hezbollah stand accused of organising and carrying out the attack, though Hezbollah itself is not formally accused.
At the time, large swaths of Lebanon’s population laid final blame for the assassination on Syria, and enormous protests set off a chain of events that led Syrian forces to withdraw from Lebanon after some 40 years in the country.
Unlike the blast that killed Hariri and 21 others on Feb. 14, 2005, the Aug. 4 explosion was believed to be a result of nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate that accidentally ignited at Beirut’s port.
While the cause of the fire that provided the trigger is still not clear, Hezbollah, which maintains huge influence over Lebanese politics, is being sucked into the public fury directed at the country’s ruling politicians.
Even before the devastating Beirut port blast, the country’s leaders were concerned about violence after the verdicts. Hariri was Lebanon’s most prominent Sunni politician at the time, while the Iran-backed Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim group.
Tensions between Sunni and Shiites in the Middle East have fueled deadly conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and to a smaller scale in Lebanon. Some Lebanese see the tribunal as an impartial way of uncovering the truth about Hariri’s slaying, while Hezbollah — which denies involvement — calls it an Israeli plot to tarnish the group.
Hariri was killed by a suicide truck bomb on a seaside boulevard in Beirut that killed him and 21 others, and wounded 226 people.
The assassination was seen by many in Lebanon as the work of Syria. It stunned and deeply divided the country, which has since been split between a Western-backed coalition and another supported by Damascus and Iran. Syria has denied having a hand in Hariri’s killing. Following post-Hariri assassination protests, Damascus was forced to withdraw thousands of troops from Lebanon, ending a three-decade domination of its smaller neighbor.
The tribunal was set up in 2007 under a U.N. Security Council resolution because deep divisions in Lebanon blocked parliamentary approval of the court that operates on a hybrid system of Lebanese and international law. The investigation and trial cost about $1 billion, of which Lebanon paid 49% while other nations paid the rest.
Initially, five suspects were tried in absentia in the case, all of them Hezbollah members. One of the group’s top military commanders Mustafa Badreddine was killed in Syria in 2016 and charges against him were dropped.
The other suspects are Salim Ayyash, also known as Abu Salim; Assad Sabra, Hassan Oneissi, who changed his name to Hassan Issa and Hassan Habib Merhi. They are charged with offenses including conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, and face maximum sentences of life imprisonment if convicted. Sentences will not be announced Tuesday but will be determined at later hearings.
The four defendants, however, are unlikely to serve any prison time — they have never been detained despite international arrest warrants and Hezbollah has vowed never to hand over any suspects.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last week insisted on the innocence of the suspects regardless of the verdicts. “For us it will be as if they were never issued,” he said of the verdicts. Nasrallah warned against attempts to exploit the verdicts internally and externally in order to target the group.
Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of the late Hariri, has said he will make a statement regarding the verdicts after they are made public. Asked about concerns over repercussions of the verdict, he said “justice must prevail regardless of the cost.”
Since the assassination in 2005, several top Syrian and Hezbollah security officials have been killed, in what some supporters of the tribunal say were the result of liquidations to hide evidence.
