WarSclerotic

Nasrallah implies Israel behind Hariri hit – JPost – Middle East.

  Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Saturday defended the four members of the terrorist organization charged with the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, praising the men as “brothers” and implying that Israel’s hand was behind the UN tribunal that last week issued the indictments.

Speaking from an undisclosed location, Nasrallah addressed the allegations for the first time since the UN court announced the indictments on Thursday. Charges that Hezbollah was behind the 2005 killing of the prominent Sunni leader have already inflamed sectarian tensions in the small and fractious country.

Nasrallah lamented that charges had been brought against “brothers who have made history in resisting the Zionist occupation.”

“We mentioned the possibility of having Israel involved in the murder and the fact that [Israeli] agents were present at the murder scene one day before the murder,” he said, according to a translation provided by the website Now Lebanon.

“No one in the STL [Special Tribunal for Lebanon] even asked the Israelis anything. This is normal, why? Because the tribunal, since its formation, had a precise goal and no one was allowed to talk to the Israelis … Instead of investigating the Israelis, [the STL] gathered information from them,” he said.

Nasrallah dismissed the tribunal as “politicized,” and said the arrest warrants issued against the Hezbollah operatives “are a step in a long journey whose course is becoming clearer, following Israel’s defeat and the victory of the resistance in the [Second Lebanon] war.”

The 2005 assassination of Hariri, seen as a Sunni leader, plunged Lebanon into a series of crises which included killings and brief internal fighting.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Jamal Wakim of Lebanese International University defended Nasrallah’s comments. “It would be in the interest of Israel to implicate Hezbollah in such an act so that it’s viewed not as a resistance moment but a terrorist movement involved in acts not only against Israelis but Lebanese,” he said. “That would mean it is a Shia movement that killed a Sunni leader … In order to engender civil strife that could lead to a civil war.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

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