DAMASCUS, 13 June 2006 — Syria is satisfied “in principle” with a new UN report into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Information Minister Mohsen Bilal said in remarks published yesterday. “In principle, Syria is satisfied with the report of the inquiry commission. Syria is studying it before making final remarks,” Bilal was quoted as saying in the newspaper Al-Baath.
“The report is professional to a certain degree, and it keeps away from politics,” Bilal said, in the first official Syrian reaction to the report. Syria was widely suspected of involvement in the Hariri killing.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora yesterday also hailed the “impartiality” of the report. Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz, head of the UN commission probing Hariri’s murder, delivered his report on Saturday to UN chief Kofi Annan.
The two first reports by German magistrate Detlev Mehlis, Brammertz’s predecessor, implicated high-ranking Syrian and Lebanese officials in the murder, and highlighted a lack of cooperation by Damascus in the inquiry.
The Brammertz report noted that cooperation with Damascus had improved, but at the same time insisted that “full and unconditional cooperation from Syria to the commission remains crucial.”
Hariri was assassinated on Feb. 14, 2005, by a massive car bomb on the Beirut seafront that also killed 22 others. The crisis triggered by his murder led Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon later that year after 29 years of military and political domination of its smaller neighbor.
Bilal, speaking on Lebanese satellite television, also said “Syria has cooperated fully and since the start, for a professional and non-political inquiry.”
