Tribunal Hits Back at Hizbullah: Nasrallah’s Claims Intended to Discredit Cassese
Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on Saturday intended to ruin the reputation of Special Tribunal for Lebanon President, Judge Antonio Cassese, by saying that he’s a “dear friend of Israel,” tribunal sources told An Nahar newspaper.
Nasrallah, during his televised speech Saturday night, cited a speaker at a security conference in Herzliya, Israel, as regretting Cassese’s non-attendance, as proof that the STL judge, was biased toward the Jewish state.
“Cassese refused to attend that conference because he considered it biased” and “didn’t agree” to the statements made there, the sources told An Nahar on Wednesday.
The sources remarked that Cassese wrote a number of articles, one of them published by the Financial Times on October, 14, 2009 about the Gaza flotilla that was intercepted by Israel.
“He (Cassese) had defended in all his articles the Palestinian people and their right to have their own country… But, Nasrallah has no idea at all what judge Cassese did, said and wrote for the Palestinian people,” the sources added.
They accused the Hizbullah chief of seeking “to confuse” the work of the STL.
“Nasrallah has an agenda… he wants to discredit judge Cassese and the tribunal by criticizing issues that he has no evidence about.”
Meanwhile, a judicial source told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat that the Lebanese judiciary didn’t receive any formal request from the office of STL prosecutor Daniel Bellemare to hand it the documents and videos presented by the Hizbullah chief on Saturday.
The U.N.-backed STL last week issued a sealed indictment for the 2005 assassination of Hariri, along with arrest warrants for four Lebanese men.
The four are operatives of Hizbullah.
Ad-Diyar newspaper reported that international investigators will visit Lebanon on July 15, to submit a list of additional 12 suspects who are members of Hizbullah accused in the indictment into the probe of Hariri’s murder.
However, Prosecutor Bellemare’s circles said the new arrest warrants would be submitted pending raids by Lebanese security authorities to find the other four suspects.
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