Former Special Tribunal
for Lebanon Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare expressed optimism that the
perpetrators of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005 will be
brought to justice.
“I never despair…Look at
the Balkans. Some of them took 12 or 15 years before they were found,”
Bellemare, a Canadian, said in his first interview after he resigned his post
at the end of his tenure on Feb. 25 for health reasons.
The STL sought to try
four indicted Hizbullah operatives in absentia after efforts to apprehend them
had failed.
“Even a conviction in
absentia would do much to end the corrosive culture of impunity that has
dominated Lebanon for decades,” Bellemare told Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
The former STL official
stated that Hizbullah didn’t know that the circumstantial evidence would be
there to lay charges, noting that the investigator’s work became more difficult
after there was reference to the communication data in a U.N. report.
"Hizbullah didn't
know at the time that the cellphones were leaving traces. After that, the line
went dead,” Bellemare said.
He lashed out at the
party for describing him as a “puppet of the U.S. and of Israel.”
"The way the
argument went is that Israel could not defeat Lebanon militarily, so now they
were trying, through the tribunal, to defeat Lebanon,” Bellemare said.
The accusation the
tribunal was politically motivated was "so insulting," he said.
"We were always driven by one thing: to find the truth."
The tribunal was set up
in The Hague in 2009 by the United Nations after a massive car bomb attack
killed Hariri and 22 others in Beirut.
The former prosecutor
revealed that the investigation suffered a blow after the assassination of
Internal Security Forces Major Wissam Eid, who was top Lebanese investigator
into the murder of Hariri.
“Eid found the cellphone
networks all led back, in one way or another, to land lines inside a
Hizbullah-run hospital,” Bellemare said.
Eid met with U.N.
telecom experts and expressed his will to help with the investigations. Eight
days after his initial meeting with the U.N. investigators, Eid was killed by a
bomb that destroyed his vehicle.
"It was a very,
very key starting point for us," Bellemare added.
He praised all the
Lebanese governments that succeeded during the work of the STL saying that even
Prime Minister Najib Miqati, who is leading a cabinet dominated by Hizbullah,
was very supportive of the tribunal’s work.
"They all want to
find the truth," he insisted.
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