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Washington, Mehlis Challenge STL’s Francine Decision

Washington, Mehlis Challenge STL’s Francine Decision
folder_openUnited States access_time14 years ago
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Source: Al-Manar TV, 30-04-2009
Edited by Hizbollah site staff

The four Generals are out. Free men, not suspects.

Their release by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon's pre-trial judge Daniel Francine has come as a shock to the March 14 camp.

The Loyalty bloc is trying to absorb the blow, especially after senior March fourteenists had spent nearly four years saturating journals, televisions, internet sites and podiums with sham.

They had incriminated the Generals, vowed to send them to gallows and publicly announced to make their families shed tears of blood on the four officers.

The coverage of March fourteenist media yesterday reflected a state of denial and shock on the one hand and inability to react to the collapse of a March 14 postulate they had been trying to establish as ultimate truth.

The Mustakbal "Future" newspaper is seeking to insinuate that the four generals are still suspects in the Hariri murder case. The daily says that Francine had ordered their release because the general prosecutor has not yet reached the stage where he can officially press charges against "specific individuals." It added that "the release of the four officers comes in the framework of the great progress made in the investigation and during a transitional phase towards prosecution and beginning the trial."

Some find it hard to swallow that a significant progress in an investigation in a case as big as Hariri's assassination could not find a shred of evidence to link the officers - individually or collectively - to the crime.

Washington and Detlev Mehlis, the former chief investigator in the Hariri case had to interfere.

"These four officers are still under investigation by the tribunal prosecutors. So the prosecutors indicated that the investigation is ongoing," Acting State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.

For his part, Mehlis, who had left Beirut without prior notice and resigned from his post as chief investigator after he and his fake witnesses were exposed, resurfaced to light and bestowed his viewpoint upon the public opinion. "Unless Bellemare personally announces that the four officers were no longer suspects, then they would legally remain suspects," Mehlis said.

"Mehlis was a colonialist; he used to impose his decisions on the Lebanese judicial authorities thus undermining Lebanese sovereignty. He considered himself to be the ‘lord of the castle' whereas his mission was limited to helping the Lebanese authorities in investigating Hariri's assassination. This was in favor of ‘Israel' as it helped it in it endeavor to cause disengagement among the Lebanese and create internal sedition in our country," Lawyer Omar Nashabi, Al-Akhbar newspaper columnist, told Al-Manar website.

Nashabi said that Mehlis was only expressing his own point of view and that Francine's decision was crystal clear that they are neither suspects nor accused in the Hariri case. "If we go back to the constitution, nothing indicates that the officers were suspects. So I advise Mr. Mehlis to read carefully and stop delusions and manipulating the Lebanese judiciary," Nahsabi added.

Mehlis also turned a blind eye on the "four years" of arbitrary detention when he said that the four officers' arrest was ‘legal and necessary' for the five months that followed his recommendation to detain them as a preventive measure and to keep them ready for the court's investigation. Mehlis' made his recommendation based on the false testimony of Mohamad Suheir Siddiq, who was arrested recently in the UAE and awaits extradition to Syria.


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