Lebanon's parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri talks to reporters after a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace in Paris October 19, 2006.Charles Platiau/Reuters
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri slammed a CBC news report that portrayed a fumbling United Nations investigation into the 2005 assassination of his father, former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
"The media leaks do not serve the course of justice," the Western-oriented Mr. Hariri told a group of Lebanese reporters Tuesday.
The CBC investigative report, broadcast Monday evening, accused the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon of "timidity, bureaucratic inertia and incompetence bordering on gross negligence" in the handling of its investigation, and it cited information provided by former and current inquiry investigators to back up the charges.
Rafik Hariri and 22 others were killed when a massive truck bomb exploded on the city's seaside road as the former prime minister's convoy of armoured vehicles drove past.
The CBC report said that all the evidence they were shown pointed to Hezbollah, the Islamist political-military organization, as being responsible for the assassination. The report accused the five-year-old inquiry of ignoring vital avenues of investigation, including analyses of cellphone usage in the area, and it named the current head of intelligence of Lebanon's Internal Security Force (ISF) as a suspect in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Prime Minister Hariri was especially disturbed by that charge. "Colonel Wissam El Hassan has our full confidence. He had it and still has it."
At the time of the assassination, Col. Hassan was responsible for Rafik Hariri's security, but was curiously absent from the convoy in which he normally would have ridden that fateful day.
"Hassan was, and is, very close to the Hariri family," said an experienced Beirut-based security analyst. "He has the full backing of the Americans," he added. "It's beyond belief that he would have colluded with Hariri's assassins."
Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Mousawi said the organization's leadership needed "time to study the whole thing" before making any comment. But he said it was hardly news that Hezbollah was being accused by investigators, accusations that leader Hassan Nasrallah has emphatically denied.
Daniel Bellemare, the former Canadian Justice official who has been chief prosecutor of the Hariri tribunal for the past 20 months, said he was "extremely disappointed" about the CBC report, which came "at a time when the Office of the Prosecutor is working flat out to ensure that a draft indictment is submitted to the pretrial judge for confirmation in the near future."
Mr. Bellemare's office said the prosecutor's statement was highly unusual and that he chose to break from the policy of not making any public statements during the investigation out of "concern for the integrity of the investigation and the safety of victims, witnesses, suspects and staff."
"The most serious impact of the CBC reports is that their broadcast may put people's lives in jeopardy," Mr. Bellemare said.
"It will be for the judges, and the judges alone, to assess the evidence and reach conclusions based on the facts as established at trial, and the law," he said.
The CBC report was cutting about Mr. Bellemare's performance, alleging that he spent inordinate amounts of effort (and staff time) pursuing personal matters.
Choosing to ignore the blistering personal attack, Mr. Bellemare said that "whatever the challenges faced in this investigation, which has been conducted in extremely difficult circumstances, the staff of the Office of the Prosecutor remain committed to bringing it to a successful conclusion."
The CBC report "would be laughable if it weren't so serious," said the Western security analyst. He said the report put far too much store in the record of cellphone calls.
"You have be very wary of these things," he said from experience. "They can be very misleading and," without real-time intercepts identifying the callers, "they're purely circumstantial."
Editor's note: The original newspaper version of this article and an earlier online version contained incomplete information. A CBC report cited a UN document naming the current head of intelligence of Lebanon's Internal Security Force (ISF), Colonel Wissam El Hassan, as a suspect in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. This version has been corrected.