The Lebanese Hezbollah scored a major victory on Tuesday when the Special Tribunal for Lebanon failed to declare the organization responsible for the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri.
To be clear, delivered 11 years after the tribunal was first established, this verdict is an absurdity at odds with the court’s own established facts. The tribunal avoids holding Hezbollah responsible, but its summary and judgment findings offer ample evidence of the Party of God’s guilt. Indeed, the only thing this trial has proved is that international tribunals are incapable of handling complex terrorism cases.
The court documents the four defendants’ membership of Hezbollah and their involvement in a conspiracy directly related to Hariri. But it only convicts one of the defendants, Salim Ayyash. The plot ringleader Mustafa Badreddine was dropped from the case after he was killed in 2016 by order of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The other defendants, Hassan Merhi, Hussein Oneissi, and Assad Sabra, are acquitted. This verdict seems designed only to keep Hezbollah happy, perhaps because Nasrallah once threatened to “cut off the hand” of anyone seeking to hold the suspects to account.
But the facts are clear.
Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister and prominent Sunni Muslim power broker, was killed on Feb. 14, 2005, when his convoy was targeted by an explosive-laden Mitsubishi Canter. The tribunal identifies the explosive as the military-grade RDX and “the equivalent of 2,500 to 3,000 kilograms of TNT.” How the suspects were able to access such a large quantity of RDX, access to which is highly controlled even in Lebanon, is the first indication of Hezbollah’s culpability in Hariri’s death. The court documents how tensions between Hariri and Hezbollah had reached a fever pitch shortly before the killing, after Hariri endorsed a call to see Syria’s military and intelligence apparatus forced out of Lebanon. In a triumph of understatement, the tribunal says this background means “Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr Hariri, and some of his political allies.”
Yet, the clearest evidence of Hezbollah’s culpability is the defendants’ established membership of that group and their extensive communication in and around Hariri’s person.
Each of the suspects is shown to have had either professional or familial links to Hezbollah and contacts with its officials. And in August 2011, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah attacked the tribunal for targeting the four defendants. Referencing Hezbollah’s “resistance” identity, he referred to the defendants as “four honorable resistance men.” Hezbollah’s leader thus provides the best evidence of the defendants’ status as Hezbollah operatives.
Adding to the forensic evidence of Hezbollah’s guilt, the tribunal documents a vast portfolio of cellphone call location and call metadata. We are educated to a network of five different cellphone groups, each color labeled by the court for clarity: these being a green network with three phones that “monitored and coordinated the attack and the false claim of responsibility,” a blue network of 15 phones and a yellow network of 13 phones that were used for surveillance and preparation for the attack, and a red group of eight phones that were used for the actual assassination. A fifth group of purple phones was used for a false claim of responsibility.
This use of cellphones evinces the plotters’ operational security training and associated steps to evade signal interception. It also indicates the plotters’ patient collection of intelligence as to Hariri’s security, movements, and corollary vulnerabilities. These are tactics that Hezbollah teaches, but which many terrorists do not understand. By using multiple networks of phones used specifically for the attack, Hezbollah hoped to reduce their culpability footprint.
We also see how Hezbollah aimed to distract from its involvement by kidnapping “Abu Adass, a religious 22 year old,” and then having him release a martyrdom video. That video shows Adass claim responsibility for an attack on Hariri, but it does not offer specifics. None of Addas’s DNA was found at the actual explosion site, but DNA from 92 body parts belonging to another unidentified male indicate that this second male was the suicide bomber. Addas “disappeared from his home in Beirut on the morning of Sunday 16 January 2005 and his family has not seen him since.” He was the fall guy.
Each of the defendants ceased communication immediately following the attack. Considering Hezbollah’s command structure in the context of the assassination’s obvious geopolitical ramifications, it is utterly ridiculous to think that the attackers acted alone or that Nasrallah did not authorize the killing. Astonishingly, however, the court says that “there is no evidence that the Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr. Hariri’s murder and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”
This is a sacrifice of the facts at the altar of Hezbollah’s gun. Or in this case, explosives.
Perhaps the best way to sum up this verdict is the court’s reference of a sad story from that February 2005 day. Underlining why so many Lebanese now doubt that their government will objectively investigate the recent Beirut port explosions, the court documents the Lebanese authorities incompetence in responding to the 2005 explosion. It describes how one victim “was found only after repeated attempts by his family to search for him at the crime scene, on their own and on one occasion with search dogs they brought on site and paid for themselves.”
That story is a metaphor for the court’s joke of a decision here. Nine years later, it has delivered a great gift to a terrorist group deserving exactly the opposite. Once again, Hezbollah has got away with its desecration of Lebanese democracy.
