The Interior Ministry issued a statement on Tuesday responding to a report published earlier by The Daily Star newspaper regarding the ministry’s cooperation with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL).
The statement said that The Daily Star’s report made it look like the ministry delayed in responding to certain STL requests.
“The [STL] requested from the Interior Ministry to provide a copy of the fingerprints records kept by the Ministry, preferably in an electronic version. [We] thus called on the STL investigators to limit their request to a certain number of fingerprints as we have more than four million fingerprints,” the statement said.
The investigators complied with the ministry’s request, so we gave them a few hundred fingerprints in our computer records, the statement also said.
The Interior Ministry also said that the STL requested the former to match electronic versions of fingerprints to hard copies in the ministry, but added that “unfortunately” there are over 4 million hard copies randomly kept in two depots related to the ministry.
The ministry thus informed the investigators that a group of officers were assigned to sort the files in order to match the ten fingerprints that the investigators demanded be urgently matched on December 2, 2010.
The Daily Star reported earlier in March that four ministers have not complied with information requests from STL Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, including Interior Minister Ziad Baroud.
Interior Minister Ziad Baroud said in remarks published March 4 in the Daily Star that he has supplied Bellemare with fingerprint records, but added that it was not possible to give him the fingerprints of all the Lebanese.
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