DAMASCUS, 6 November 2005 — The Syrian probe into the slaying of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri has called on anyone with information to telephone or stop by its offices, the Ath-Thawra daily reported yesterday.
The commission of inquiry was set up after a UN probe into the February killing implicated Lebanese and Syrian officials, also criticizing Damascus for a lack of cooperation.
Syria’s inquiry has asked for anyone “with information on the assassination of Rafik Hariri to contact it by telephone or by visiting” its offices in Damascus, the Ath-Thawra daily reported.
The probe’s head, Judge Ghada Mourad, has said that she will question Syrian citizens, civilian or military, on everything related to the UN’s commission of inquiry mission.
President Bashar Assad set up the commission last week, explicitly to work in cooperation with the UN probe headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.
UN Security Council Resolution 1636, adopted unanimously on Monday, calls for Syria’s full cooperation with the international inquiry into Hariri’s assassination in massive Beirut bomb blast.
The UN probe’s report, released last month, accused Damascus of blocking the investigation, found “converging evidence” of top-level Syrian and Lebanese involvement and included witness testimony that named Bashar’s brother and brother-in-law as among those who plotted the murder.
Syria has pledged to cooperate, while denouncing the resolution as “unjust” and calling the report “biased.”
French President Jacques Chirac on Friday renewed his call for Syria to show “full and complete cooperation” with the UN inquiry into the assassination of Hariri at a meeting in Paris with Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad Bin Jasim Al-Thani. Officials in Chirac’s office said the two men held talks for 45 minutes, half of that time in private.
The Qatari minister, for his part, said Damascus was prepared to assist the UN investigation in line with a UN Security Council resolution put forward by France, Britain and the United States and adopted early this week.
Six Die in Wall Collapse
Six people were killed and two others injured when a bus station wall, weakened by the affects of torrential rains, collapsed in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus, the Ath-Thawra daily reported yesterday.
Six microbuses parked in the station were destroyed in Friday’s accident, the newspaper said, without specifying whether the victims had been inside them or not.
