[LCM Articles] Newsweek: Who killed Rafik Hariri?

[Loai Naamani]

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Center of the Web 
Who killed Rafik Hariri? A long-awaited U.N. report points clearly to Damascus.

By Christopher Dickey and Kevin Peraino

Newsweek

 

Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sheik Ahmed Abdel-Al was a busy man last Feb. 14, the day an enormous truck bomb in Beirut killed former
Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others. He says he was working in his office at the benign-sounding Association of
Islamic Philanthropic Projects in Lebanon at the time and is innocent of any crime. But calls made on the sheik's cell phone in the
minutes before the bombing and the hours and days afterward have led the United Nations commission probing the murder to conclude
that Abdel-Al, more than "any other figure," is "linked to all the various aspects of this investigation."

There are other, higher-profile names in the report, which President George W. Bush termed "deeply disturbing" after it was
submitted to the Security Council last week. The commission cites "converging evidence pointing at both Lebanese and Syrian
involvement in this terrorist act." President Bashar al-Assad is not directly implicated, but an unnamed source in the report "who
claims to have worked for the Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon" fingers his brother, Maher al-Assad, and brother-in-law Asef
Shawkat as the masterminds behind Hariri's murder.

Damascus tried to dismiss the findings as rumor and speculation by anonymous witnesses with their own agendas. "It's a pity that
people are sitting and dreaming and writing reports," said Syria's U.N. Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad. But the U.S. and other countries
were contemplating sanctions, including a ban on commercial air traffic to Syria. What makes the commission's work a nightmare for
the al-Assad regime, in fact, is a mountain of documentary evidence that includes the records of 70,195 telephone calls. "This is
the first time anyone has ever had the tools to build up a case as complicated as this against Syria," says an Arab intelligence
officer who served in Beirut during the civil war and insists on anonymity.

Analyzed with what the report calls "specialized software," the phone records expose networks of fear and conspiracy as complex as
wiring diagrams. Set against the 30-year history of Syrian intrigues, they conform to a longstanding pattern of covert activity
using Lebanese officials and fronts to carry out murderous attacks on the enemies of Damascus. In the 1980s, the targets included
American diplomats, soldiers and civilians. Today, even though Syrian troops withdrew in April after enormous international pressure
and popular protests in Beirut, many of those networks still appear to be in place. The U.N. report cites nine bombings and
assassinations since May. As a result, several anti-Syrian politicians, even though they won a majority of seats in the Lebanese
Parliament last June, have decided for their own protection to spend much of their time outside the country.

In the schematics of the Hariri assassination laid out by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor who heads the commission, Abdel-Al
looks like a switchboard in the middle of these elaborate circuits. His organization, known as Al-Ahbash in Arabic, works among
Palestinians in their refugee camps, preaches an Islamist line and maintains close ties to Lebanese and Syrian intelligence
services. It has connections in every direction. At 10:35 the morning Hariri was killed, Abdel-Al called the chief of Lebanese state
security in Beirut. At 11:42 he called a Syrian intelligence officer named Jamea Jamea. At 11:47 he dialed "a number" not otherwise
identified in the report. At 12:12, he was on the phone with another Lebanese Army intelligence officer. Hariri's motorcade should
have reached the point where he was killed at just about this time, but was held up in traffic. At 12:26, a caller at the
unidentified number rang Abd! el-Al's home. The caller tried again at 12:46, then 12:47. Abdel-Al himself called his home at 12:54.
The bomb that killed Hariri went off at 12:56.

And the day was far from over. Abdel-Al made more calls to Syrian intel officers, including Syria's proconsul for Lebanon, Gen.
Rustum Ghazali. The sheik also rang the head of Lebanese military intelligence. Abdel-Al's brother Mahmoud works closely with Emile
Lahoud, Lebanon's Syrian-backed president. Mahmoud Abdel-Al called Lahoud at 12:47, nine minutes before the blast, then immediately
called the head of Lebanese military intelligence at 12:49.

Hariri had been at the parliament building and might have taken any of three different routes when he left. The records show that
six mobile-phone numbers were used by surveillance teams that had staked out the whole area. Those lines were activated in January
but never used for any communications except with each other. On the morning of the killing there were several calls, but those
stopped at 12:53, three minutes before the explosion. None of those mobile-phone lines was ever used again. The commission found
they'd been bought from a company with close links to Abdel-Al's organization.

A few minutes after the bombings, anonymous callers rang the Al-Jazeera and Reuters news bureaus to claim the attack was the work of
a hitherto unknown group called Al-Nasra wal Jihad. (Records show calls had been made to Sheik Abdel-Al from those same phone booths
in the past.) Al-Jazeera was told where to find a videotape of a young man named Ahmad Abu Adass, giving his reasons for becoming a
"martyr" by blowing up Hariri. After the tape aired on Al-Jazeera, Abdel-Al became a conduit for information about Abu Adass, his
family and his fanaticism. The sheik tried to convince the U.N. commission that Abu Adass was indeed the killer, but the commission
didn't buy it. What the evidence does show, the report concludes, is "that Mr. Abu Adass left his home on Jan. 16, 2005 and was
taken, voluntarily or not, to Syria, where he has since disappeared."

The case against Damascus won't go away any time soon, however. The mandate for Mehlis to continue his investigation has been
extended to Dec. 15.

With John Barry and Mark Hosenball in Washington 

C 2005 Newsweek, Inc. 

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