Hariri STL has enough evidence to conduct trial

The four men accused in Hariri's assassination. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon earlier on Wednesday said that the pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen had “found the prosecution presented sufficient evidence on a prima facie basis to proceed to trial” in connection with the car bombing in February 14, 2005, which killed Hariri and 22 others. “The pre-trial judge has ordered that his decision confirming the indictment related to the February 14, 2005 attack, as well as the indictment itself, be made public,” the Special Tribunal for Lebanon said, in order to “proceed to trial.” The publication Wednesday comes after the tribunal said last week that Lebanese authorities had been unable to arrest the four suspects or serve them with their indictments, according to The Associated Press.
They are accused of detonating the truck bomb on February 14, 2005, that killed Mr. Hariri and 22 others – a number that includes a suicide bomber.
The trial will create political tension between the concerned political parties, but will not have negative implications on the ground, a political analyst in Beirut said.
Internationally, all eyes will be on the Lebanese government's stance. On "the international arena, everyone will wait for the government's reaction," Emil Khoury, columnist and writer for the An-Nahar newspaper, said. The Lebanese cabinet is scheduled to hold a meeting today after which it will announce its position, he told Gulf News. So far, only former prime minister Sa'ad Hariri has reacted to the STL's announcement by urging Hezbollah to turn in the four accused, all of whom are members of the Lebanese group.
The leader of Hezbollah has said that an indictment accusing four members of the Shia group of taking part in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, contained "no direct evidence" against them.
Hassan Nasrallah was responding to the publication earlier on Wednesday of an indictment, which linked the four Hezbollah members to the attack largely through circumstantial evidence gleaned from telephone records in the months leading up to Hariri's February 2005 assassination. Sealed arrest warrants for the men were issued in June by the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), setting the stage for the case to go to trial, but none of the four has been detained by Lebanese authorities and Hezbollah said they will never be arrested. Nasrallah accused the tribunal of being unscientific, saying: "When you read the text released by the tribunal, you will not find any substantial evidence, not a single piece of direct evidence is included." "The only thing the tribunal relies on in is the mobile phone records, and even that is circumstantial. It doesn't even prove that any of these alleged suspects made any of these calls or even owned these phones. "All of this is pure speculation. That's why the text is littered with sentences like 'it is possible to deduce, or it is likely that this or that' ... What kind of ridiculous evidence is this?" he asked.
Naim Salem, a professor of international affairs and diplomacy at Notre Dame University in Beirut, told Al Jazeera that people would be disappointed that the indictment did not bring much new evidence to the fore.
"We were expecting the indictment to bring some new data that had not been heard or seen before but 90 per cent of what's been said today was published before," he said.
"It is a shortcoming that will not convince many Lebanese and Arabs [of the tribunal's legitimacy]. The problem is that it's mostly circumstantial [evidence] and we know that Israel and others have the capability to duplicate mobile phone cards."
The STL, which was established by the United Nations in 2007 to investigate the killing, has had a polarising effect on Lebanese domestic politics, dividing the country into two distinct camps; those who believe the STL is pushing forward a political agenda to bring down Hezbollah, and those who believe that the court is the only institution that will be able to objectively rule on the killing.
Hezbollah and its cabinet allies have dominated Lebanon's coalition government since members of a coalition led by Saad Hariri, Rafiq al-Hariri's son, quit amid controversy over the STL investigation.
Hezbollah has denied any involvement in the assassination, saying that the investigation leading up to the indictments had been politically motivated and ignored the possibility of investigating other suspects.