BEIRUT, Sept 10: An exiled former Syrian intelligence officer has claimed that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his Lebanese counterpart, Emile Lahoud, ordered the assassination last year of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.

“Bashar Al-Assad and Emile Lahoud gave the orders for Hariri’s murder,” Mohammed Zuhair Saddiq was quoted by the Beirut daily An Nahar on Sunday as saying in an interview with the Dubai-based Al Arabiya satellite television channel.

“No other Syrian or Lebanese officer could have done this,” he said in the interview broadcast on Saturday night.

Saddiq also claimed that ‘former Lebanese officials and certain Arab officials’, whom he did not identify to Al Arabiya, ‘also participated in this crime’.

Saddiq, a former colonel in Damascus’ intelligence service who was speaking from Paris, also claimed that he had seen the car used to kill Hariri and 22 other people in a massive explosion on the Beirut seafront on February 14, 2005.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Saddiq said of the car, which he said had been prepared for the attack at a camp in Zabadani, near Damascus.

“I gave photos of it to Detlev Mehlis,” who was the first head of a United Nations probe into the assassination, widely blamed on Syria and its allies in Lebanon, and roundly denied by both. “I kept the negatives.”

Saddiq also claimed to have a tape recording of a conversation in which a Damascus official had encouraged him to recant.

He said he had been promised ‘better arrangements’ than those offered to Hassam Taher Hassam, another Syrian who had retracted similar claims to those of Saddiq in testimony to the UN panel.

Saddiq, whose extradition Syria is seeking from France, also refuted Syrian media claims that there were 64 arrests warrants pending against him.

—AFP