Judges of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon convicted one member of the Hezbollah terror group on Tuesday and acquitted three others for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
According to the report by the AP, the son of Rafik and former prime minister Saad Hariri said his family accepts the verdict. “Justice will be executed, regardless of how long it takes,” he said at the court in Leidschandam, Netherlands.
The tribunal, however, did not find any evidence that the leadership of the Hezbollah terror group and Syria were behind the 2005 suicide truck bomb that assassinated Hariri.
According to the report, presiding Judge David Re said the judges that studied the evidence in the trial of the four Hezbollah members allegedly involved in the killing and were “of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr. Hariri and some of his political allies.”
But he said there was no evidence that “Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr. Hariri’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”
The summary of the ruling is more than 2,600 pages. The prosecutors in the case relied mostly on cellphone data of the accused Hezbollah members, said the report.
There had been five Hezbollah suspects at the beginning of the trial, though one of them was killed in Syria.
Even if the four remaining operatives are found guilty, Hezbollah has said it will not hand over any suspects.
