Mehlis Follows on Murr-Ghazaleh Quarrel to Verify Assad's Threat to Eliminate Hariri

 

German Prosecutor Detlev Mehlis has investigated in Yarze the claim of a Syrian threat served on Defense Minister Elias Murr before the July attempt on his life because, if ascertained, it would lend credence to contentions that President Assad had threatened ex-Premier Rafik Hariri face-to-face to physically eliminate him. "Mehlis in the Defense Ministry to Probe the Dimensions of Ghazaleh's Threats," screamed an 8-column banner-line across An Nahar's page-one on Wednesday, a day after Murr made the bombshell revelation of the telephone quarrel he had with Syria's former military intelligence chief Rustom Ghazaleh prior to his assassination attempt. There was little information on the official level about Mehlis' visit to the Defense Ministry complex in Yarze beyond a terse release that said acting Defense Minister Yacoub Sarraf held talks at his office with Mehlis. Sarraf is sitting for Murr while he is undergoing treatment in Zurich for injuries he suffered in the July 12 car-bomb attempted assassination. Murr made the bombshell revelation in the course of a talk show on the LBCI Beirut TV network that was devoted Monday evening to the booby-trap car bombing to assassinate the station's star anchorwoman May Chidiac Sunday. Murr, long a staunch ally of Syria, said the Chidiac affair made him incapable of keeping silent any longer about his quarrel with Ghazaleh when he was interior minister last year. The Mehlis commission requested a full text of the talk show on Marcel Ghanem's Kalam El Nass before going to Yarze, An Nahar noted. "Murr's testimony ascertains that the Syrian authority was making threats to Lebanese officials during the era of tutelage, which lends credence to the threats Rafik Hariri received face-to-face from President Assad before the extension of President Lahoud's term in office a year ago," according to An Nahar. Hariri repeatedly spoke privately of the Assad threat before he perished in a massive bomb attack near Beirut's St. George seafront hotel Feb. 14. Hariri's longtime Economy Minister Bassel Fleihan was also killed in the blast along with 21 other persons, including six bodyguards of the billionaire Lebanese leader. "The Defense Minister's revelation constitutes the strongest evidence of Syria's coercion. He is the living witness who escaped death in an assassination attempt, who has come forth to supply the (U.N.) investigation with events of a high value," said An Nahar. "Murr's testimony also has uncovered Syria's relationship with fundamentalist groups it is using in Lebanon, which means the circle of accusation of Damascus on the Iraq connection is spreading now to Lebanon," An Nahar concluded.