Syria - belatedly - seeks redress

[FarCenter]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI22Ak02.html

By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - Syria took a much-anticipated yet overdue step last week, appealing directly to the United Nations to bring its former prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, to justice. Mehlis, a German attorney, was the author of a dramatic UN report issued in October 2005 that accused Syria of masterminding the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in Damascus on February 14, 2005.

When it was released, Mehlis' 53-page report ripped through Syria and Lebanon like a thunderstorm, reading more like an Agatha Christie novel than a legal document.

"There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services," said the report.

Syria appealed for a UN inquiry into the report's author in a September 17 letter to the UN, with Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem writing that Mehlis and his assistant Gerhard Lehmann had tried to "implicate the Syrian Arab Republic at any cost" in his report on the Beirut explosion that killed Hariri, former economy minister Basil Fleiham and 22 others.

Syria has noted that none of Mehlis' findings has been authenticated by any of the prosecutors who have succeeded him, including the most recent, Canadian Daniel Bellemare.

Based on Mehlis' findings, four senior Lebanese officers were arrested in 2005 on charges of involvement in the Hariri case. Last April, however, all were released by an international court, due to lack of evidence. One of the officers, Jamil Sayyed, gave several press interviews after his release, saying that Mehlis had tried to talk him into naming any Syrian official in the crime - in exchange for Sayyed's release from jail - regardless of the official's actual guilt.

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