U.N. Commission Questions President's Son in Hariri's Murder

A consensus has been reached by the Saad Hariri-led majority of the new parliament to put President Lahoud's expulsion drive on the back burner, pending the outcome of the ongoing Beirut investigation by an international Commission of Inquiry into Rafik Hariri's assassination, the Beirut daily As Safir reported on Monday. The commission, which is headed by Berlin Prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, has lately been focusing the probe on people within President Lahoud's orbit. It questioned Lahoud's son-in-law, outgoing Defense Minister Elias Murr, and then subjected the president's Aide-de-Camp, Brig. Gen. Mustafa Hamdan, to a 10-hour interrogation session last week and searched his office at the Baabda palace as commander of the Presidential Guards Brigade. As Safir said Monday that the commission had later questioned the President's son, Ralf Lahoud, and Hamdan's brother, Majed, who co-own the private security firm responsible for the Saint George area where Hariri was assassinated by a truck-bomb that also killed his economic advisor Bassel Fleihan and 20 other Lebanese, including six bodyguards. The paper gave no further details about the interrogation of Ralf Lahoud and Majed Hamdan. But it noted that Lebanon's examining magistrate Emile Eid had questioned on his own former Internal Security Forces Commander Ali Hajj about post-assassination attempts to remove all traces from the crime scene, including the lifting of all cars of Hariri's devastated motorcade. The interrogation focused, too, on the mysterious disappearance of a BMW car from the assassination location. The president has in the meantime escalated his counter-offensive against widespread demands for his resignation, vowing in an interview with CNN's White House correspondent Wolf Blitzer to stay on in power throughout the Syrian-dictated 3-year extension of his term through Nov. 24, 2007. "I shall stay on to the end of my mandate. The extension has been willed by Lebanese parliament members," Lahoud said on the third straight day of public assertion that also sought to exonerate Syria from guilt in the Hariri assassination and the subsequent murders of An Nahar's columnist Samir Kassir and Communist Party leader George Hawi. Lahoud repeated his contention that either Israel or Islamic extremists were behind these murders.