…especially the deleted ones.
Via the Times of London: UN office doctored report on murder of Hariri
The United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.
The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.
Most intriguing–and damning: both of the UN investigation and the Syrian government.
The names?
The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.The deleted names represent the inner core of the Syrian regime. Maher al-Assad, President al-Assad’s younger brother, is a lieutenant-colonel and head of the Presidential Guard. He is known for his quick tem- per and six years ago was said to have shot his brother-in-law, General Assef Shawkat, in the stomach during an altercation.
General Shawkat, also among the deleted names, is married to President al-Assad’s headstrong sister, Bushra, and was appointed commander of Syrian military intelligence on February 14 this year, the day Mr Hariri was murdered. Gen- eral Shawkat’s predecessor at Military Intelligence was General Hassan Khalil, the third name on the deleted list.
General Bahjat Suleyman, the fourth Syrian on the list, was until June the head of the internal affairs section of the powerful General Security Department, the main civilian intelligence service.
The only Lebanese on the deleted list is General Jamal al-Sayyed, the former head of the General Security Department in Lebanon. General al-Sayyed features prominently in the report and is alleged to be one of the ringleaders plotting Mr Hariri’s assassination.
Now the questions are: 1) what will get more attention out of this story: the fact the UN redacted the names or that Syrians in question or 2) the fact that the Syrian inner-circle has been implicated?
And, of course, beyond that, what is going to be the response of the Lebanese government?
If anything, the assassination of Hariri has hardly turned out to have been a good idea for the Syrians government, as the direct results have been their expulsion from Lebanon, the mobilization of anti-Syrian political forces in Lebanon and now international exposure of a most unpleasant kind.
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