No Evidence Hezbollah Leadership Had Any Involvement in Hariri’s Killing, UN-Backed Tribunal Says

In February 2005 former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed when a huge truck bomb blew up in Beirut. Hariri, a billionaire construction tycoon, was Prime Minister from 1992 until 1998 and again between 2000 and October 2004.

Judges are reading out their judgement at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in a village near The Hague in the Netherlands on Tuesday 18 August.  

Four Hezbollah members – Salim Ayyash, 56, Assad Sabra, 43, Hassan Oneissi, 46, and Hassan Habib Merhi, 54, – have been tried in absentia. Their whereabouts are unknown but Hezbollah has said it will not hand them over.

Charges were dropped against a fifth suspect, Mustafa Badreddine, after he was killed during the Syrian civil war in 2016.

​Judge David Re, an Australian, said the bombing was “undoubtedly a political act” and he said the evidence showed Syria was dominant in Lebanon at the time and opponents of the Syrian presence included Mr Hariri’s Future Movement.

“The trial chamber is of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr Hariri and some of his allies. However, there was no evidence that the Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr Haririr’s murder and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it,” said Judge Re.

On 14 February 2005 Harris and 20 others were killed when a truck bomb as he drove through downtown Beirut. More than 200 people were wounded.

When the trial opened in January 2014 a prosecutor told judges the explosives were packed into a Mitsubishi truck were designed to create a “man-made hell.”

The judge said Mr Hariri was planning to run in the May 2005 elections and would have campaigned for a reduction in Damascus’s influence and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

President Assad has always denied any involvement in the assassination but in the wake of Hariri’s death a so-called Cedar Revolution saw widespread protests against Syria, which withdrew the last of its troops from Lebanese soil in April 2005.

The prosecutors at the tribunal did not have to prove a motive for the attack and never put forward any reason for why Hezbollah would want Hariri dead.

But they claimed Hezbollah had deliberately put forward a false claim of responsibility on behalf of an allegedly fictional group.

In the wake of the explosion, al-Jazeera received a video from a Palestinian man called Ahmad Abu Adas who claimed to be a suicide bomber who had carried out the attack on behalf of a group called ‘Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria’ and said Hariri had been a tool of the “infidels” Saudi Arabia.

The prosecutors said the group was fictional and the suicide bomber’s DNA did not match Mr Abu Adas. The suicide bomber remains unidentified.

Hariri was a close ally of both France and Saudi Arabia but since his death it has been revealed he held secret weekly meetings with Nasrallah.

There has been speculation Hezbollah carried out the bombing as a favour to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who reportedly resented Hariri’s efforts to reduce Damascus’s influence in Lebanon.