In the course of the ongoing international investigations into the Hariri killing, sources close to the Lebanese judiciary told The Daily Star that head of the UN probe Detlev Mehlis was "not satisfied with Damascus' level of cooperation." The sources cited examples of Syrian witnesses who were questioned by Mehlis under the supervision of high-ranking Syrian officers "who intimidated the witnesses preventing them from saying anything relevant in fear of being penalized by their superiors." Sources added that Mehlis, who is leaving Lebanon for Vienna within the next two days, "might pay a pop visit to Damascus to re-question witnesses, or summon those witnesses to Europe to debrief them."Also on Friday, Lebanese investigating Magistrate Elias Eid listened to the deposition of several "secret witnesses," while State Prosecutor Magistrate Saeid Mirza received reports of the primary investigations carried out by the Internal Security Forces investigators with the detained engineer technician Majed Khatib, who works for Lebanon's mobile phone-line company MTC Touch. Based on the deposition and the primary investigations, Mirza will decide whether to free Khatib or press charges against him and issue an arrest warrant. Khatib was detained based on charges of hiding information and "giving contradictory statements regarding several facts including the deletion of information from the company's central data regarding certain phone-lines." According to allegations made by the media, the eight related phone-lines are suspected to have belonged to the perpetrators and were only used before and during the assassination of Hariri.
According to Al-Hayat newspaper on Friday, some Lebanese sources close to the UN probe ruled out the "suicide bomber possibility" in determining how Hariri was killed. Al-Hayat reported that a car filled with explosives was parked on the road which Hariri took. The newspaper also reported that mobile phones in the area were jammed following the explosion, which led to the formulation of the mobile phone-lines theory.