Revelations on Rafik Hariri’s assassination

by Thierry Meyssan

Part 2: who fired the missiles?

So, who fired the missile? This is where things get complicated. According to the military experts, in 2005, Germany was the only country which had a handle on this new technology. It is, therefore, Berlin which supplied and set up the crime weapon. Hence, it is easy to understand why former Berlin Attorney General Detlev Mehlis - controversial in his profession - was eager to preside the UN Investigation Commission. Mr Mehlis is notoriously linked to the German and US secret services. Assigned in 1986 to investigate the disco attack in Berlin, he diligently covered up all Israeli and US fingerprints to falsely accuse Libya and justify the US bombing of Khadafi’s palace. In the early 2000s, Mr Mehlis was lavishly paid for his stint as researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (think-tank linked to AIPAC, the Israel Lobby) and at the Rand Corporation (think-tank attached to the US military industrial complex). All these elements cast a shadow over his impartiality in the Rafik Hariri affair and should have sufficed to have him taken off the case.

Mehlis was seconded by Commissioner Gerhard Lehmann, also a well-known German and US secret services agent. A witness formally identified him as having taken part in the programme run by the Bush Administration in Europe, involved in abduction, detention and torture of prisoners in "black holes". His name is mentioned in the Council of Europe’s ad hoc Report. However, he managed to dodge all judicial proceedings on the basis of a strong but unlikely alibi provided by colleagues in the German police. Mehlis and Lehmann propagated the theory of the explosives-laden suicide van to deflect the investigation from the German weapon that was used to commit the crime. Various earth samples from the scene, first mixed, then divided in three jars, were sent to three different laboratories. In the first two no trace of explosives was found. Mehlis and Lehmann kept the third jar and sent it to the third laboratory, where remnants of explosives were detected. In principle, if the decision is made to resort to three judiciary experts, in case of disagreement it is the majority opinion that prevails. No way! Mehlis and Lehmann violated the protocols. They deemed that theirs was the only reliable sample and embarked the Security Council on a false trail.


Detlev Mehlis, President of the UN Investigation

Commission, violated all the rules of the criminal

procedure, fabricated evidence and used false

witnesses to exonerate Germany and accuse Syria

The flawed character of the Mehlis-Lehmann investigations has amply been proven. Their successors acknowledged as much sotto voce and declared entire sections of proceedings null and void. Amidst their manipulations, the most famous one relates to the false witnesses. Five individuals purported to have seen the preparations for the attack and incriminated Presidents Bashar el-Assad and Emile Lahoud. While these allegations were fuelling the drums of war, their lawyers exposed the lies and the prosecution backed down.

Based on these false testimonies, Detlev Mehlis arrested - in the name of the international community - four Lebanese generals and had them incarcerated for four years and detained members of their entourage for questioning. With his assistants - who spoke Hebrew to each other - he manipulated their families. Thus, on behalf of the international community, he showed the wife of one of the generals a doctored picture to prove that her husband had not only obscured his implication in the murder, but was also two-timing her. Concurrently, Mehlis tried to convince the son of the "suspect" that his mother was a woman of loose morals, leading his desperate father into a murderous folly. The aim was to induce a family crime of honour. And Lehmann proposed to set one of the generals free in exchange for his false testimony against a Syrian leader.

Interestingly, German journalist Jürgen Cain Külbel highlighted a disturbing detail: it would have been impossible to trigger the explosion by remote control or by marking the target without first deactivating the powerful interference system built into Rafik Hariri’s convoy. A system among the most sophisticated in the world, manufactured in ... Israel. Külbel was approached by a well-known pro-Palestinian advocate, Professor Said Dudin, to promote his book. However, the outrageous declarations frequently made by Dudin served to torpedo it instead. Külbel, a former East German criminal police officer, was quick to find out that Dudin had a long-standing reputation for being a CIA mole in the German left-wing. The journalist published a number of old East-German reports attesting to this fact and was sentenced and briefly imprisoned for illicit dissemination of documents. Meanwhile, Dudin was settling into the German Embassy in Beirut for the purpose of infiltrating the families of the four generals.

Overlooked in the Middle East, Germany’s role in this region is worth spotlighting. After Israel’s war of aggression against Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Chancellor Angela Merkel deployed a very large contingent to join the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The 2.400 German soldiers control the maritime infrastructure to prevent arms supplies from reaching the Resistance via the Mediterranean. Ms Merkel declared that the German mission was to protect Israel. But a wind of rebellion arose among the officers, who by the hundreds wrote to remind her that they had enlisted to defend their homeland, not a foreign country, be it an ally. An unprecedented development took place on 17 March 2008 and 18 January 2010, when the German and Israeli governments held a joint Council of Ministers meeting where various defence programmes were adopted. At this stage, there shouldn’t be too many secrets left between the Tsahal and the Bundeswehr.

Detlev Mehlis’ investigation is both steeped in ridicule as regards the false witnesses, and tainted with the illegal detention of the four generals. This led the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to formally and firmly condemn this excess of power. The opprobrium that befalls Mr Mehlis’ work should not reflect on the Tribunal, which is in no way responsible for his manipulations. However, the credibility of the Tribunal rests on its ability to curb, in the first place, all those who attempted to mask the truth and falsely accused Presidents Bachar el-Assad and Emile Lahoud, with the intention of provoking a war. It now transpires that the Tribunal refuses to try the false witnesses, giving the impression that it is covering up the manipulations under Mehlis’ watch and is in fact pursuing the similar political objectives (this time against the Hezbollah, and perhaps against others in future). Even worse, the Tribunal denies Jamil Sayyed (one of the generals illegally detained) the minutes of his accusers’ hearings, thereby barring him from claiming compensation and making it look as if the Tribunal condones four years of arbitrary detention.

French journalist Thierry Meyssan is a political analyst, founder and chairman of the Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace conference. He publishes columns dealing with international relations in newspapers and magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. Last books published in English: “9/11 the Big Lie” and “Pentagate.”