Lebanon's Cabinet passed legislation in consensus last night to transform the Internal Security Forces headquarters into a prison for three of the four security heads accused of complicity in the assassination of late Premier Rafik Hariri. The session was convened in an extraordinary session at Baabda Presidential Palace following a closed-door meeting between President Emile Lahoud and Premier Fouad Siniora, which might have facilitated the legislation to be passed in consensus.Following the session, Information Minister Ghazi Aridi told reporters the former director general of the ISF will be transferred to a military barrack in the Defense Ministry, saying it is inappropriate to detain him at the institution he formerly ran. According to an official Cabinet statement, Siniora said that "due to the fact that the detainees are some of the highest military and security chiefs in the country, and in order to regulate the situation in a proper fashion, we saw that it would be more convenient that the suspects should not be detained in an institution they used to head." In his own statement, Lahoud reasserted his previous position regarding the suspects, stressing that all "the accused are innocent until proven guilty."
"If they are innocent, they will return to their positions. Otherwise, they will be held accountable for their crimes," he added. The Cabinet decision came after Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa, one of Beirut MP Saad Hariri's closest allies, reported during Monday's regular session that three of the four security chiefs were receiving visits from non-family members, particularly officers loyal to the pro-Syrian regime. Justice Minister Charles Rizk, a Lahoud loyalist, rejected Sabaa's charge, saying that the visits which were allowed to the three generals were legal and had no adverse bearing on the progress of the international or domestic investigation into Hariri's murder. The decision to convene the emergency Cabinet session under Lahoud's chairmanship was reached after the president threatened to abstain from signing a decree to legalize the Surete Generale's prison.