Garda-led investigating team to arrive in Lebanon

A United Nations-appointed team led by Deputy Garda Commissioner Peter Fitzgerald will arrive in Beirut in the next two days to investigate the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

The United States and France had led calls for an international investigation of the February 14 explosion on a Beirut seafront that destroyed Hariri’s motorcade of armour-plated vehicles, killing him and 16 others and injuring more than 100 people.

After a public briefing on Middle East issues yesterday, undersecretary-general for Political Affairs Kieran Prendergast told a closed-door UN Security Council meeting that the inquiry team led by Deputy Garda Commissioner Fitzgerald would arrive in Beirut in the next 48 hours.

“We have a lot of confidence in the team that’s been put together to try to get to the bottom of Mr Hariri’s assassination,” acting US Ambassador Anne Patterson said after the council meeting.

Prendergast told council members that the team would stay in the region for several weeks and report to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the security council within a month.

France’s UN Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere expressed satisfaction that the inquiry would meet French president Jacques Chirac’s demand for an international investigation, saying: “It is very close to what we have asked.

“What is important is to give an international dimension to the quest of truth because if not, we will not have the truth. We hope and we are confident that this team” will succeed.”

He stressed that it was also very important “to have the Lebanese government co-operating with this team.”

At the request of the security council, Annan last week appointed Fitzgerald to lead a team to urgently report on ”the circumstances, causes and consequences” of the assassination.

The team includes two other senior Garda officials, Chief Supt Martin Donlan and Patrick Leahy who heads the National Support Bureau, as well as UN legal adviser Leila Benkirane and political adviser Ezzedine Choukri-Fisher, a Middle East expert, council diplomats said.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said he expected the team to be ”looking at evidence and trying to reconstitute how this crime was committed and, if possible, who committed it”.

“They’re starting in Lebanon,” he said. “And if they feel they need to go wider than Lebanon as part of the inquiry, they will do so.”

During yesterday’s closed-door council meeting, Patterson and de La Sabliere said they also reiterated US and French demands for Syria to withdraw its 15,000 troops from Lebanon, as called for in a UN resolution adopted on September 2 which they co-sponsored.