Hezballah suspected in Hariri murder case

AFP:

The UN commission investigating the murder of Rafiq Hariri now suspects Hezbollah was behind the former Lebanese premier's assassination, a German magazine reported on Saturday.

New evidence shows that special forces of the Lebanese Shiite militant group "planned and executed" the car bomb attack that killed Hariri and 22 others in February 2005, Der Spiegel reported on its website, citing sources close to the UN special tribunal for Lebanon and internal documents.

But it said the head of the investigative commission, Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, and others at the tribunal "want to hold back this information, of which they have been aware for about a month."

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According to Der Spiegel, the Iran-backed Shiite group is implicated through the discovery of two linked networks of mobile phones, all belonging to Hezbollah's "operational arm."

It says a secret unit of Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of eight mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area around Hariri leading up to and on the day of his murder.

The unit then uncovered a second network of about 20 mobiles that repeatedly had close contact with the first network.

The magazine added that investigators struck lucky when a suspected Hezbollah member, who had completed training in Iran, used one of the "hot" phones to call his girlfriend, leading to his identification.

Meanwhile, the Der Spiegel report says Hezbollah's commando unit is thought to be behind the assassination of Eid in a Beirut suburb in January 2008.

The revelations offer a dramatic twist to an investigation that has already pointed the finger at Syria but in recent months had appeared to have gone cold.

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Hezballah is a proxy force for Iran and Syria so it is not surprising that they would be used in a plot to murder the Lebanon leader whose was standing up to Syrian hegemony. The Der Spiegel story is here.