Plan to appoint Canadian to head Hariri inquiry announced
Lebanon-UN, Politics, 11/14/2007

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has informed the Security Council of his plan to appoint a senior Canadian legal figure as the next head of the independent commission tasked with investigating the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic al-Hariri and many other killings in Lebanon.

Ban sent a letter to the council detailing his intention to appoint Daniel Bellemare, who served until recently as Canada's deputy attorney-general, as the Commissioner of the International Independent Investigation Commission (IIIC), UN spokesperson Marie Okabe told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on Tuesday.

Bellemare will replace Serge Brammertz, who had previously informed Ban that he would not be available to head the IIIC when his current mandate expires at the end of this year. Brammertz, who is Belgian, has served as Commissioner since early 2006, when he succeeded Detlev Mehlis of Germany, a press release issued by the UN Information Center (UNIC) said here on Wednesday.

In April 2005 the council set up the IIIC after an earlier UN mission found that Lebanon's own inquiry into the Hariri assassination was seriously flawed and that Syria was primarily responsible for the political tensions that preceded the attack.

Hariri died in a massive car bombing in Beirut in February 2005 that also took the lives of 22 others.

Brammertz told the council last year that evidence obtained so far suggests that a young, male suicide bomber, probably non-Lebanese, detonated up to 1,800 kilograms of explosives inside a van to assassinate Hariri. The IIIC is also probing at least 17 other cases in Lebanon.

This year Ban began taking measures to formally establish a special tribunal of an "international character" to try the suspected killers of Hariri, and possibly those responsible for the subsequent assassinations in Lebanon as well.

Okabe said that the Secretary-General is awaiting a response from the Security Council to his letter regarding Bellemare.

Previous Stories:
  France's decision to contribute to Hariri tribunal creation fund   (10/16/2007)
  Hariri accuses Syria of campaign against Saudi Arabia   (8/27/2007)
  French help Lebanon crisis; democracy support urged in elections   (7/23/2007)

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