WASHINGTON, Oct 31: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has warned the Lebanese government could be the target of new assassination attempts and strongly suggested Syria was behind the destabilisation campaign.
Ms Rice, in an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, said Washington had received information of plots against the government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and other anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon.
“We too have heard that there are people who would like to destabilise the government of Prime Minister Siniora,” Ms Rice said, according to a transcript of the interview which was released by the State Department late on Monday.
“We've heard that there are people who would like to intimidate or assassinate again, they've done it before in Lebanon,” Ms Rice said, referring to the murder last year of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a giant car bombing in Beirut.
“The evidence is there that foreign influences have -- ever since the assassination of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri -- have tried to use assassination and intimidation against the Lebanese people,” she said.
While insisting she didn't want to accuse anyone specifically of threatening new attacks on Lebanese authorities, Ms Rice added: “It's not any great secret that there are concerns about what Syria, which once occupied the country, might try and do through continuing contacts in the country.”
”I don't want to accuse any one place; I just want to make very clear that the international community believes there should be no foreign intimidation of the Lebanese people,” she said in the interview, which was conducted late last week.
Ms Rice on Monday met Lebanon's Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a leading figure in the anti-Syrian movement, who was seeking US backing for the creation of an international court to try those found responsible for Hariri's assassination.
Hariri was assassinated on Feb 14 last year in a massive bomb blast on the Beirut seafront that killed 22 others. The popular five-time prime minister had opposed the three-year extension of the mandate of Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emil Lahoud.—Reuters
