Lebanon’s Lack of Answers Raises Questions

The bombing scene is a ghastly tableau of charred, crumpled cars and shattered glass against an azure Mediterranean Sea flecked with whitecaps.

Steel barricades and uniformed soldiers keep visitors 100 yards from where former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and at least 18 others in his motorcade died in a thunderous explosion Feb. 14.

But the barriers haven’t stopped people from coming to look and ponder the mystery that has plunged their nation into political turmoil.

Hariri’s assassination a month ago remains unsolved, and widespread suspicion that Syria or its allies in the Lebanese government were at least indirectly responsible have fueled much of the anger behind a wave of anti-government protests, including a demonstration Monday in downtown Beirut that drew an estimated 1 million people.

Among people chanting and holding placards calling for an end to three decades of Syrian occupation were demonstrators saying simply, “The truth”-- a shorthand demand that the two governments own up to a role in the killing. Both governments have denied responsibility.

Lebanese authorities have said little lately about the investigation, after intially focusing on a Palestinian man and a group of Muslim pilgrims from Australia.

The lack of answers, in a nation with a record of unsolved assassinations during its 1975-90 civil war, has led many people to conclude that the government is hiding something, or has badly botched the probe.

“Such a big crime -- here we are [a month] after and still there are many problems,” said Omar Khatib, a 41-year-old lawyer who visited the site with a friend Tuesday afternoon. “I think we will never know.”

For residents accustomed to Syria’s long reach into Lebanese affairs, the idea that Hariri could have been murdered without official involvement, or negligence, is hard to fathom.

“We are living in a country where our phones are tapped and everything is monitored. That’s why we can’t believe that someone could plan such an attack without Syrian and Lebanese secret services at least knowing about it,” said Gibran Tueni, publisher of the daily newspaper An Nahar and an outspoken member of the opposition.

Growing public impatience has bolstered opposition demands that the government allow an independent inquiry by an international body. The government has ruled out a foreign-led investigation, though it has allowed a fact-finding team sent by the United Nations to review evidence.

The team, led by three Irish police officials, was assigned to report on the “circumstances, causes and consequences” of the assassination. The delegation, with legal and political advisors and recently expanded to include bomb experts, is expected to complete its work soon and return to New York to deliver findings to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The London-based Independent newspaper reported Monday that the U.N. team had found evidence of a cover-up by Syrian and Lebanese officials. The newspaper did not name sources for its report.

A U.N. spokesman in New York declined to comment, saying the investigation was still underway.

Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami on Tuesday defended his government’s refusal to allow a foreign-run investigation. He said the U.N.’s futile search for banned weapons in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 had provided some justification for the war.

The Hariri case has many confusing twists.

Soon after the explosion, Lebanese authorities said that it probably was the work of a suicide car bomber. The blast, believed to have involved more than 600 pounds of explosives, ripped a 9-foot crater and blew out the front of the St. George Hotel, a long-shuttered Beirut landmark. At least 50 cars, burned and broken by the blast, remain parked along both sides of the barricaded street.

A purported claim of responsibility came via videotape, aired on the Arabic-language Al Jazeera satellite channel, from a previously unknown group. Lebanese officials identified the man on the tape as Ahmed abu Adas, a Palestinian living in Beirut, and seized a computer, tapes and other material from his house. He was not found.

Authorities then distanced themselves from that theory, suggesting that the video could have been made to send investigators down a wrong path.

Lebanese authorities also asked Australian officials to detain 10 Australian men who had flown home from Beirut hours after the incident. Lebanese Justice Minister Adnan Addoum said traces of explosive material had been found on airplane seats. But police in Australia cleared the men, who had been returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Critics charge that Lebanese authorities might have compromised the crime scene by removing the six vehicles of Hariri’s convoy to an army base just hours after the explosion. Skeptics also have been unsettled by discoveries of remains at the site weeks after the incident. More body parts were found last week.

The body of a 53-year-old jogger, Mohammed Abdel-Hamid Ghaleyeini, turned up 17 days after the blast. His children had appealed unsuccessfully to authorities to search for their missing father. Family members ultimately pushed their way past the security cordon and searched the rubble, where they found the man’s body under 4 inches of debris.

“For weeks they did nothing,” the victim’s 26-year-old daughter, Lama Ghaleyeini, said at the time. “They kept telling us that cats were finding feet and hands, and today the flies helped find my father. Do we have to count on cats and flies? What is the state doing?”

Mohammed Qabbani, a member of Hariri’s parliamentary bloc, said the belated discovery of the jogger’s body was indicative of the government’s “carelessness.”

Public skepticism has fed a spate of rumors and competing theories about whether the blast was caused by a car bomb or explosives buried in the street. Several visitors to the site said they now wondered about excavation they had seen taking place there a week earlier.

Not everyone blames Syria. A taxi driver, Osama Mawla, 35, said the bombing could have been the work of Palestinian militants, or, he added with a shrug, perhaps Al Qaeda.

Ghina Fakhoury, 32, who is critical of the government, gazed through designer sunglasses over the debris-strewn scene and said she was confident the answer would emerge one day.

“We will know the truth -- who killed him. We should know,” she said. “In deep, we know who.”