- BEIRUT: Hezbollah's leader said Saturday that the four men indicted in the killing of a former Lebanese prime minister are “honorable” members of his group, and he denounced the six-year investigation as a plot by Israel.
Hassan Nasrallah's remarks, given in a televised address, were his first public comments since the long-awaited indictment was announced Thursday.
The suggestion that Hezbollah was involved in the 2005 Beirut truck bombing that killed Rafik Hariri threatens to plunge Lebanon into a new and violent crisis. Hezbollah has denied any role in the killing and vowed never to turn over any of its members.
Nasrallah said the suspects named in the indictment are brothers “who have an honorable history in resisting Israeli occupation.” He went on to cast doubt on the UN-backed tribunal investigating the crime and said it was biased.
The case has further polarized Lebanon's rival factions — Hezbollah on one side and a bloc led by Hariri's son, Saad, on the other.
The bombing that killed Hariri and 22 other people on Feb. 14, 2005, was one of the most dramatic political assassinations in the Middle East. A billionaire businessman, Hariri was Lebanon's most prominent politician after a 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
In the six years since his death, the investigation has sharpened some of Lebanon's most intractable issues: the role of Hezbollah, the country's most powerful political and military force, and the country's dark history of sectarian divisions and violence.
One of the men named in the indictment, Mustafa Badreddine, is suspected of building the powerful bomb that blew up the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 Americans, mostly Marines.
