[LCM Articles] Fwd: The mystery of Mr Lebanon's murder

[Nader Shaar]

>_______________
>The mystery of Mr Lebanon's murder
>After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken from the 
>scene on the orders of a former aide. And now, reports Robert Fisk, many 
>believe the missing cars may hold the key to the killing
>17 March 2005
>
>
>Now here's a strange story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one of fear 
>and suspicion about Rafik Hariri's murder on 14 February; stranger still 
>because - although almost everyone in Beirut knows the story -much of it 
>has not been published in Lebanon.
>
>It involves a man called Ali Salah Haj and Hariri himself - and the 
>mysterious decision to move the most vital evidence of his murder from the 
>scene of the crime. Some say it is all a mistake, the result of 
>inexperience or ignorance. Others believe it holds the key to how the 
>former billionaire prime minister was murdered in a bombing that cost the 
>lives of 18 other innocents.
>
>It all begins in the late 1990s when Hariri was prime minister. He lived 
>in a palace of pre-stressed concrete in the Beirut suburb of Qoreitem and 
>travelled everywhere with a government-supplied team of escorts from 
>Lebanon's Internal Security Force.
>
>Of the 40 men regularly on his team, Hariri regularly drove with one of 
>its senior officers, a man he liked, the heavily mustachioed Ali Haj. 
>"Things were quite normal," one of Hariri's closest associates now says, 
>"until Sheikh Rafik found that the Syrians seemed to know everything he 
>was saying in his car. People thought he must be bugged or that there was 
>a tap on his phone. And after a while, he decided that Ali Haj might be 
>telling the Syrians what he was saying."
>
>In a land such as Lebanon - where everyone listens to everyone else 
>(Hariri had his own security informants) - that had to be investigated.
>
>"So he told Ali Haj something very specific that the Syrians wouldn't 
>like," the family associate says. "And, within minutes of meeting a Syrian 
>official that day, the very same matter was raised with him. That day, 
>Sheikh Rafik asked another security man to ride with him. Ali Haj was 
>relegated to another car."
>
>Within a short time, Ali Haj was reassigned - to a Lebanese intelligence 
>post in the Bekaa valley where he dealt regularly with Brigadier General 
>Rustum Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.
>
>Now we flash forward to 14 February 2005. Hariri's armoured motorcade, 
>struck by a bomb of around 600kg, lies blazing in the narrow road beside 
>the St George Hotel on the Beirut Corniche. The vehicles, pitted with 
>shrapnel holes, perhaps bearing traces of the explosives, formed a pattern 
>which showed how the bomb scattered the cars - as well as the order in 
>which the convoy was travelling.
>
>But within hours - although every other burning car was left intact beside 
>the highway - Hariri's vehicles had disappeared. The decision was taken by 
>the man who is now head of the Syrian-controlled Lebanese Internal 
>Security Force, a certain Brigadier General Ali Salah Haj.
>
>He ordered that the wreckage should be removed from the scene of the crime 
>- and this, remember, was the location of the murder of the most important 
>figure in the history of independent Lebanon - and taken away on trucks to 
>the Lebanese Charles Helou army barracks. Where they remain to this day.
>
>Ali Haj was among the many thousands of mourners who later came to pay 
>their respects to the Hariri family. Witnesses later recorded he was given 
>a frosty reception. Ghenna Hariri, the young daughter of Hariri's sister 
>Bahiya, a Lebanese MP in the southern city of Sidon, greeted him with the 
>words: "Your place is not here." When he offered his hand to Hariri's 
>widow Nazek - who now wears her late husband's wedding ring on a chain 
>round her neck - she touched her chest modestly rather than take Ali Haj's 
>hand.
>
>In a country where everyone believes in the "moamara" - the Plot - it is 
>essential not to point the finger. No one has yet discovered who set off 
>the bomb that killed Hariri. But there are a number of remarkable elements 
>about the Lebanese investigation.
>
>The first is that, a month after Hariri's murder, it has still given no 
>information about it. Furthermore, the bombing took place in a part of 
>Beirut - site of a recent Francophone conference, close to the Phoenicia 
>Hotel where many foreign dignitaries stay and within half a mile of 
>parliament - the most heavily guarded area of Lebanon.
>
>For the killers to have avoided the attention of the ISF, the army, the 
>traffic cops and a host of other security organisations as they prepared 
>their bomb was a truly extraordinary achievement. And for anyone to have 
>ordered the removal of the principle evidence from the scene of the crime 
>was an even more unlikely denouement.
>
>One of those working on the Lebanese security investigation has admitted 
>there have been "many mistakes made", suggesting Ali Haj's decision to 
>move the Hariri convoy cars came about because of his conflicting 
>loyalties - he had been one of Hariri's own bodyguards but was now a 
>senior security officer - rather than any desire to cover up the evidence.
>
>He also said the police are convinced the killer was a suicide bomber, 
>possibly an al-Qa'ida operative who targeted Hariri because of his links 
>with the Saudi royal family. Hariri held Saudi citizenship. Hariri's 
>supporters are increasingly convinced the bomb was hidden under the 
>roadway, down a drain or a telephone cable duct.
>
>It's easy to see how each theory suits their respective creators. An 
>al-Qa'ida murder clears the Lebanese and Syrian security authorities of blame.
>
>The bomb-under-the-road story suggests the Lebanese military security 
>institutions must have been breathtakingly careless in failing to notice 
>the planning and planting of the bomb.
>
>The Lebanese and the Syrians believe in the al-Qa'ida plot - even they are 
>blaming the Israelis as a poor second - but the political opposition is 
>increasingly fingering Syria for, at the least, incompetence, 
>carelessness, even criminal negligence.
>
>Hence Hariri's supporters - even many thousands of those demanding the 
>truth about Hariri's death - are demanding the resignation of seven 
>principal figures, all deeply in the pro-Syrian Lebanese justice or 
>intelligence services. They include General Ali Haj. The remainder are: 
>Adnan Adoum, the minister of justice and prosecutor general; Jamil Sayed, 
>the head of Lebanese General Security; Mustapha Hamdan, head of the 
>Lebanese Republican Guard; Raymond Azar, the head of the"mukhabarat" 
>intelligence service; Edgar Mansour, the head of "national security", and 
>Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the security service's "listening 
>department", the "Amn el-Tanassot".
>
>The authorities have refused to accept the list, claiming all are 
>honourable men performing their duties with patriotism and devotion.
>
>Needless to say, there's an old Arab argument which runs in parallel with 
>any ordinary policeman's first question: in whose interest was it to 
>commit the crime? Ask the Syrians, and they say they would never commit 
>such an act, not least because the calumny which the accusations have 
>since brought upon Damascus have caused such political disadvantage to 
>Syria's young president, Bachar al-Assad - who has himself condemned the 
>killing as a "heinous crime."
>
>Syria's political friends in Lebanon - some of them Bachar's acquaintances 
>- have been pointing out, accurately, that the American neo-conservative 
>project for the Middle East originally drawn up by Messers Perle, Feith, 
>Wurmser and others, called not only for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein 
>but for diverting of Syria's attention "by using Lebanese opposition 
>elements to destabilise Syrian control of Lebanon."
>
>How better to destabilise Syria in Lebanon than by killing Hariri?
>
>Those million Lebanese who demanded Syria's withdrawal, the resignation of 
>the Lebanese president and the truth about Hariri's murder on Monday do 
>not recognise themselves in this scenario. They also demanded to know who 
>killed ex-President Rene Mouawad, the Grand Mufti Khaled and the Druze 
>leader Kamal Jumblatt.
>
>It is worth pointing out that the Christians among the demonstrators did 
>not call for the truth about the murder of prime minister Rashid Karami 
>and National Liberal leader Danny Chamoun - because wartime Christian 
>militiamen rather than the Syrians are widely regarded as their murderers.
>
>The imminent return from self-imposed French exile of the messianic 
>ex-General Michel Aoun - who led a hopeless "war of independence" against 
>the Syrians in 1989 which cost thousand of innocent lives - is a clear 
>sign that the opposition here could find themselves gravely embarrassed.
>
>Most, in fairness, do not personally blame President Bachar al-Assad of 
>Syria for Hariri's murder. They were insulted by his speech in the Syrian 
>parliament last Saturday but are well aware that far more ruthless men 
>exist in Syria - and outside Syria's borders - to whom Hariri's fate could 
>be assigned, or even self-assigned.
>
>Many opposition leaders, including Walid Jumblatt - it was his father 
>Kamal who was murdered - hope desperately Bachar was not involved. But it 
>remains the case the Lebanese security officers who were appointed to 
>guard Lebanon on Syria's behalf have established a wretched reputation.
>
>Why, for example, were three more bodies discovered at the site of the 
>Hariri mass murder in the two weeks that followed the bombing?
>
>Ali Haj could immediately take the vital evidence from the scene of the 
>crime - something which no police force in the world would do - on the 
>grounds that he needed to "protect" it. But how come his investigation 
>failed to spot three corpses at the scene?
>
>When the Zahle MP and former Syrian ally, Mohsen Dalloul, announced this 
>week that the Lebanese authorities "knew" who had assassinated Hariri - 
>who was the unofficial leader of the Lebanese opposition to Syria until 
>his death - those same authorities were as silent as the proverbial grave.
>
>Maybe they are listening to the million Lebanese who demanded the truth. 
>Or maybe they are just following the usual trade of all security services, 
>silently listening to their telephone lines. I say this because just three 
>days ago, Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the Lebanese eavesdropping 
>department, put a tap on my home telephone in Beirut. Well, there's only 
>one response to that: call any time.
>__________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
>
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