UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21: The United States said on Friday that Damascus be held to account after a UN investigation implicated senior Syrian officials in the bombing that killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Syrian officials, in Damascus, Washington and at the United Nations dismissed the report as political and said the charges were false.
“You have clearly a case in which there is an implication that Syrian officials were involved in the assassination of Rafik Hariri,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
“These are charges that will lead the international community to have to seriously consider how it demands accountability,” she said.
Her UN ambassador, John Bolton, said the first order of business was to make sure Syria cooperated with the probe, which faulted Damascus for giving false information.
“In the absence of serious Syrian cooperation on substantive matters, the mission can’t get to the ultimate truth,” Bolton told reporters in New York. “That is what is seems to me the focus the UN Security Council should be.”
Asked about sanctions against Syria, Bolton said Washington was considering a range of options. Other Security Council diplomats thought any sanctions might be selective and not include heavy trade embargoes.
TWO VERSIONS: The final version of the report omitted names from a key paragraph on who made the decision to kill Hariri in his motorcade in Beirut.
The names of the Syrian president’s brother, Maher Assad, and his brother-in-law Maj. Gen. Asef Shawkat, were edited from a paragraph in the final report. Journalists saw both the final and initial versions.
Shawkat is mentioned in other sections of the report as involved in the assassination plot but Maher Assad is not.
Mehlis said he deleted the names when he learned the report would be made public because he only had one witness and wanted to preserve a presumption of innocence.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric denied Secretary-General Kofi Annan had influenced the final report, and attributed the flap to a clerical error.
After the report was sent to the 15-nation Security Council on Thursday, Annan authorized the investigation to continue until Dec. 15, a sign that the council might issue warnings but not take any strong action before then.
A witness quoted in the report said Shawkat set up an Islamic militant, Ahmed Abu Adass, as a decoy to claim responsibility for the plot.
Shawkat, Syria’s military intelligence chief, allegedly forced Adass to confess on a videotape two weeks before the assassination. But the actual suicide bomber was probably an Iraqi who thought he was killing Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a visitor in Beirut shortly before the bombing, the report said.
The report said a key person in touch with all the plotters had telephoned Lebanese President Emile Lahoud minutes before the explosion. The disclosure prompted calls for Lahoud’s resignation among anti-Syrian parliamentarians in Beirut.
Lahoud’s press office denied the president took such a call and indicated he would not be forced from office.
DAMASCUS DENIES CHARGES: Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dakhl-Allah dismissed the UN findings as political.
“The report is far from the truth,” he told Al Jazeera TV. “It was not professional and will not arrive at the truth but will be part of a deception and great tension in this region.”
Syria’s ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, said the Mehlis report was biased and unfair.
“The report is full of political rumors, gossip and hearsay and it has not a single shred of evidence that will be accepted by any court of law,” he said.
Hariri was a strong critic of Syria’s domination of Lebanon. His death, along with those of 20 other people in the truck bombing on Beirut’s seafront, sparked world outrage and Lebanese protests that forced Syria to end its 29-year military presence.
The report said Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara as well as his deputy gave investigators false information.—Reuters
