BEIRUT, 29 December 2005 — A Lebanese judge probing the scandal of Al-Madina Bank which has been linked to the killing of former Premier Rafik Hariri was in hospital after being attacked yesterday, police said.

Judge Nazem Khoury was attacked by unidentified assailants and beaten around the head as he walked in hills north of Beirut, police said.

Khoury, who is leading an inquiry into the collapse of the Al-Madina Bank two years ago amid allegations of money laundering, managed to call family members after the attack. They took him to hospital, where he was in a stable condition.

Last October Khoury was the target of an apparent assassination attempt, when he heard noise near his house at dawn and then saw two men fleeing, abandoning explosives they were putting under his car.

The UN inquiry into Hariri’s killing last February has established that fraud, corruption and money laundering may have been connected to the assassination.

“The commission has followed threads leading into the Al-Madina Bank collapse in mid 2003, including links to Lebanese and Syrian officials as well as to Mr. Hariri,” an inquiry report said recently.

The Central Bank of Lebanon appointed an administrator to run privately-owned Al-Madina in July 2004 after finding a $1.2 billion discrepancy in its account.

Unconfirmed reports said the bank was used for the money laundering of several trillion dollars by many organizations.

Meanwhile, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara said yesterday that Syria would cooperate to the “utmost extent” with the new chief of the UN investigation team, but would only do so under conditions defined by Syria.

Syria wanted to sign a protocol with the new investigation chief that would “define cooperation and levels of cooperation”, Shara said.

Such a protocol would lay out the “rights and obligations of each side”, giving Syria more credibility, he explained.

A Belgian prosecutor with the International Criminal Court (ICC) is expected to take over the UN investigation from German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis who announced his departure earlier this month.

Serge Brammertz, the deputy prosecutor of The Hague-based court is due to take up his new appointment in January.

Brammertz was appointed to the ICC in 2003 for a six-year term and has experience in tracking down terrorists in Belgium. He is expected to take a leave of absence from the ICC while he heads the Hariri investigation.