| DEBKA. |
This was indicated by two of the five Syrian officials interrogated in Vienna on Dec. 7 on the assassination of Rafiq Hariri on Feb. 14. Furthermore, no material regarding the Hariri assassination had been found in Syrian intelligence archives.
This is one of the matters on which Mehlis recommends further investigation by the UN commission in the six-month extension of the inquiry panel’s mandate he intends to request from the UN Security Council.
The second Mehlis report tightens the chain of evidence incriminating Syria in the crime.
He notes that only five of the six high-ranking Syrian officers Damascus undertook to make available for questioning were allowed to leave Syria for Vienna. The officer withheld from the team was the president’s brother-in-law and security chief Gen. Assef al-Shawqat.
The investigation identified 19 individuals as suspects in the planning and execution of the crime or deliberate attempts to mislead the investigation.
He makes a point of the witness Husam Taher Hussam, who appeared on Syrian television two weeks ago to withdraw his prior testimony to the commission which he claimed had been coerced. The Commission learned that Hussam’s account to friends before his trip to Syria was similar to the sworn account he gave the panel. His recantation was aired after Syrian officials arrested and threatened some his close relatives in Syria. Their manipulation of Hussam raises serious questions about the commitment of the Syrian Judicial Commission to conduct an inquiry into the Hariri crime.
New unnamed witnesses have approached the Commission since it submitted its interim report in October and confirmed its findings with detailed information pointing directly the Lebanese and Syrian intelligence services as perpetrators, sponsors and organizers of the Hariri murder.
One reported to the inquiry team that after the assassination, a high-level Syrian official supplied arms and ammunition to groups and individuals in Lebanon to create public disorder in response to accusations of Syrian involvement in the crime.
Lebanese military intelligence Technical Divison conducted extensive wiretapping of Hariri’s telephones over a sustained period, relaying transcripts daily to top Lebanese and Syrian officials including Raymon Azar, Jamil al Sayyed and Rustum Ghazale. The archives of these transcripts have been deleted but the commission hopes to recover the deleted data.
During the period prior to the assassination there was growing tension between Hariri and senior Syrian officials including president Bashar Assad. Following their meeting on August 24, 2004, an informal oral agreement was confirmed which set out what the former Lebanese prime minister was allowed to and not to do in relation to Syria.
Another line of investigation still to be explored for motives behind the assassination relates to fraud, corruption and money laundering linked to the collapse of the Lebanese Bank Al Madina in mid-2003. The commission was informed that Hariri declared he would take measures to investigate the bank scandal if he returned to power.