Saad al-Hariri refuses use of assassination crime to undermine Damascus
Chief of the UN investigation committee into the assassination of the Lebanese former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, judge Detlev Mehlis arrived in New York on Wednesday where he handed over the UN general secretariat a copy of his report of which another copy was dispatched to the Lebanese government presumed to be on the offices of persons concerned tomorrow, Friday.
Mehlis is presumed to hand over the report officially to the UN chief Kofi Annan in a meeting to be held today between the two men, while it was officially announced in the UN that the handing over of the report of Terry Rod Larsen on the progress in the implementation of UN resolution 1559 will take place next week.
According to widely concerned sources at the UN, the report does not hold responsible any Syrian official, nor the President of the Lebanese republic Emil Lahoud, rather keeps suspicion on several Lebanese and Syrian security sides.
The report which falls in 100 pages detailed all what the investigation committee made since starting its work four months before, incuding the full events of the assassination operation and the committee story on how it happened, results of investigations with large number of witnesses, the political climate in the course of which the assassination was made and also events of detailed investigations that took place in Syria and Lebanon, and highlighting the cooperation with the Lebanese judicial and security authorities including arresting four Lebanese senior security officers.
In a remarkable development concerning its timing and the place of launching it and its content, the chairman of al-Mustaqbal bloc parliamentarian Saad al-Hariri, son of the assassinated prime minister, called for not permitting anyone to undermine Syria under the pretext of the crime. He said after his meeting with the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the secretary general of the Arab League Amr Moussa in Cairo that all the Arabs want to know the reality and achieve justice.
Saad al-Harari stressed he will call for an international court to try the accused persons, "because, we, in Lebanon can not make a Lebanese investigation and we had asked the support of the UN to this effect." He said "it is evident that there are countries which will make use of the assassination as the cloth of Othman in order to undermine Syria, but we have not to permit that, and to seek justice and punish the criminals," noting the need of founding best remarkable relations between Lebanon and Syria."