Beirut, August 18: Lebanon’s Hezbollah submitted a dossier to a state prosecutor yesterday after a UN court requested the Shiite group provide the evidence it said it had of Israel’s involvement in the 2005 killing of Rafik Al Hariri.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last week displayed what he said was Israeli surveillance footage of routes used by Hariri, saying this pointed to Israel carrying out the suicide bombing which killed the former prime minister and 22 others.
Nasrallah displayed the footage a few weeks after he was told the Special Tribunal for Lebanon may indict some of the group’s members over the Hariri killing, an allegation he categorically rejects.
He has strongly criticised the UN tribunal and attacked it as an “Israeli project”, raising fears of renewed potential conflict between the militant group and Prime Minister Saad Al Hariri, Rafik’s son.
At a gathering late on Monday Hariri called for calm, saying Lebanon should not fear “any political noise, which we hope to calm down and turn into calm speech, and start democratic dialogue”.
On Saturday, he said he wanted to know who killed his father but at the same time he wanted stability. “Dialogue cannot succeed with the accusations of treason and with repeated calls for tests of patriotism,” Hariri said.
After Nasrallah’s two-hour presentation of footage, witness testimonies and analysis aimed at making a case that Israel was behind the assassination, the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN tribunal asked Lebanese authorities to provide all information in Nasrallah’s possession, including the footage.
Lebanese Prosecutor Saeed Mirza passed on the evidence, which he received from senior Hezbollah official Wafiq Safa, to the chief prosecutor Daniel Bellemare’s office in Lebanon, judicial sources said.
Hezbollah, which fought Israel to stalemate in a 2006 war, is determined to deflect any blame for the 2005 assassination.
Hariri’s remarks came before a scheduled session of “national dialogue” tomorrow in which rival leaders are trying to agree the country’s defence strategy towards Israel.
The first national dialogue session was held in September 2008 after a Qatari-mediated deal ended an 18-month political crisis which led to a street fighting between Hezbollah and supporters of the pro-Western Hariri which took the country to the brink of renewed civil war.
The fighting broke out when the government tried to shut down a telephone network operated by Hezbollah. Some analysts warned that such a scenario could be repeated if Hezbollah figures are indicted.
——Agencies