Six years since it was inaugurated, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has made appreciable progress in bringing Rafik Hariri’s killers to justice, but the process is nowhere near resolved. The defense has yet to present its evidence and the prosecution appears poised to point the finger at Syrian involvement in the crime.
Still, the tribunal has opened the door for Lebanese to receive answers to questions which have haunted the country for a decade.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon officially opened in the Netherlands on March 1, 2009, four years after a massive bomb tore through Downtown Beirut killing Hariri and 21 others.
Just weeks after it was launched, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon ordered the release of four Lebanese generals who had been in prison since 2005 for suspected involvement in the Hariri assassination.
The generals, Mustafa Hamdan, Jamil al-Sayyed, Ali al-Hajj and Raymond Azar were initially arrested on the recommendation of the U.N. International Independent Investigation Commission. The STL cited a lack of evidence as the reason for their release.
In June 2011, the office of the prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon filed an indictment in Beirut against four Hezbollah members, Salim Ayyash, Mustafa Badreddine, Hussein Oneissi and Assad Sabra.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah repeatedly denied the legitimacy of the court, insisting that it was a tool of the Israelis and Americans to target the resistance in Lebanon.
Nasrallah publically boasted that the four suspects wouldn’t be arrested, “even in 300 years.”
Still, the court continued to build its case and in August 2011 announced that it had the jurisdiction to investigate assassination attempts against MP Marwan Hamade and former minister Elias Murr, and the killing of Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi, declaring them “connected” to the Hariri case.
But Nasrallah’s declaration proved prescient: The court determined in February 2012 that all efforts to apprehend the four suspects had been exhausted, and that the men would be tried in absentia.
As the defense and the prosecution were preparing their case, a pretrial judge decided to confirm an indictment for a fifth Hezbollah suspect, Hassan Merhi, in the summer of 2013. The Lebanese authorities have been unable to arrest Merhi, and he is also being tried in absentia. The case against Merhi was later tacked onto the case against the four initial defendants.
The trial officially began Jan. 16, 2014, almost nine years after Hariri’s assassination.
Over the past year, the prosecution has laid out its argument that, using a series of interconnected phone networks, the suspects tracked Hariri, plotted his assassination and devised a false claim of responsibility.
Meanwhile, the defense has repeatedly challenged procedural elements of the case and the strength of the prosecution’s argument, which rests largely on decade-old telecommunications data. Moreover, the defense says that the prosecution has yet to establish a clear motive for the crime.
After hearing months of testimony from explosives experts, crime scene technicians who examined the blast site and survivors, the tribunal changed tack in November 2014 when the court agreed to hear “political testimony.”
Since November, the prosecution has called several witnesses to testify about the general political climate before Hariri’s assassination. The witnesses have all stated that Hariri’s relations with the regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria had deteriorated dramatically in the months before he was killed.
The defense has expressed frustration at the trial’s sudden change of approach, which has focused immediate attention away from the defendants and toward the Syrian regime.
To date, a number of Hariri-allied Lebanese politicians including Marwan Hamade, Salim Diab and former MP Ghattas Khoury have testified. In the coming year, high-profile politicians, including former Prime Minister Fouad Sinora and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, are expected to appear before the tribunal to discuss the political atmosphere in Lebanon before the fateful blast 10 years ago.
This spring, separate proceedings are expected to begin against two journalists and their parent companies accused of obstruction of justice. Karma al-Khayyat, the deputy head of news at Al-Jadeed TV, and the station’s parent company New TV S.A.L., as well as Ibrahim Mohamed Ali al-Amin, the editor-in-chief of Al-Akhbar newspaper and the company Al-Akhbar Beirut S.A.L. will be tried for obstruction of justice.
The accusations center around TV reports aired by Al-Jadeed and reports in Al-Akhbar that allegedly disclosed sensitive information about confidential witnesses in the Hariri case.
