DAMASCUS, 9 September 2005 — The head of the UN investigation into the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri is to visit Damascus for the first time Saturday to interrogate top security officials as suspicions rise over Syria’s role.
The German prosecutor leading the UN probe, Detlev Mehlis, “expects the Syrian authorities to cooperate,” a Western diplomat in Damascus said, and President Bashar Assad has pledged to help.
Mehlis has insisted that no Syrian suspect has been identified, while also saying he believed there were “more people involved” than the four Lebanese security chiefs arrested so far.
However, UN investigators said they have leads that point to high-level involvement in the plot to kill Hariri, according to a Der Spiegel magazine report, casting a growing shadow over former power broker Syria’s involvement.
The weekly news magazine said a unit of the Syrian secret service that was stationed in Lebanon at the time could be implicated in the Beirut seafront bomb attack on Feb. 14 that killed Hariri, a billionaire business tycoon and five-time prime minister.
In a sign of the seriousness of the probe, Bashar’s decision earlier this week to cancel a planned trip to New York for the UN General Assembly meeting Sept. 14-16 was reportedly linked to the investigator’s visit, the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar said yesterday.
Quoting unnamed US official sources, Bashar declined to travel “after the appearance of hard evidence that points to high-level Syrian involvement in the Hariri assassination,” the paper said.
Mehlis hopes to question the current interior minister who formerly served as Damascus’s military intelligence chief in Lebanon from 1982 to 2002, Ghazi Kanaan, his successor Rustom Ghazali, and two key aides in Beirut, Mohammed Makhlouf and Jamaa Jamaa.
The four served as the main pillars of the security network Syria set up in neighboring Lebanon to consolidate Damascus’s guardianship, which finally ended in April after 29 years.
Der Spiegel said the arrests last week of three Lebanese ex-security chiefs and the head of pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s presidential guard on charges that include premeditated murder could “mean a breakthrough and bring Syria to book.”
