LONDON, 9 December 2005 — Syria is engaged in secret talks on reopening peace negotiations with Israel in a bid to avoid UN sanctions over its alleged role in former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri’s murder, a British daily said yesterday.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have urged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to relaunch talks with Israel broken off in 2000, during discussions on the sidelines of a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Makkah that opened Wednesday, The Guardian reported.
It said Arab leaders were seeking to revive a 2002 plan by Saudi King Abdullah for a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement.
The plan, proposing official recognition of Israel by all Arab countries in exchange for the return of occupied Arab land, was on the agenda at a closed-door session of the summit, it said, quoting an unnamed Arab official.
“Syria would go along with almost anything at this point,” a senior Arab diplomat told The Guardian. “They are looking for any leeway. They do not want to be penalized like Libya or Iraq. They are definitely looking for a way out of this mess.”
Hariri was killed in a Feb. 14 bomb blast that also killed 20 others on the Beirut seafront.
An interim report issued in October by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor heading a UN probe into Hariri’s murder, implicated top Syrian intelligence officials in the killing.
