Bellemare Says Hariri Murder Perpetrators Will be Brought to Justice

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.