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Hezbollah suspects to be tried over Rafik Hariri
BBC- A UN-backed tribunal has published charges against four suspects in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and says it has enough evidence to try them.
The four, all connected to Hezbollah, were linked to the killing by circumstantial evidence from phone records, an indictment says.
Lebanon has not been able to arrest the men, who will be tried in absentia.
Rafik Hariri and 22 others were killed in February 2005 in central Beirut.
The tribunal released the suspects’ names, photos and other biographical information last month.
The wanted men are Mustafa Amine Badreddine – a high-ranking figure in the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah – Salim Jamil Ayyash, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hassan Sabra.
The tribunal’s 47-page indictment alleges that Mustafa Badreddine was the overall director of the operation.
Salim Ayyash, another senior Hezbollah official, is alleged to have co-ordinated the attack on the ground.
Mr Hariri’s assassination plunged Lebanon into a series of political crises, killings and bombings that led to sectarian clashes in 2008, dragging the country to the brink of civil war.
The accusations over the killing, which have been in the air for more than a year, have been a major embarrassment to Hezbollah which sees itself as the standard bearer of resistance to Israel, the BBC’s Jim Muir reports from Beirut.
It has vehemently denied any involvement and dismissed the UN-backed tribunal as a tool of a Western and Israeli plot to discredit it.