It reads like the cast of a B-movie: part fantasy, part thriller. A hooded witness, shaking off his disguise, recants his evidence. An-other character is introduced as a fanatical assassin but ends up a likely decoy. Yet another may be innocent, tangled in a web of intrigue. The melodrama of the UN investigation into the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is intensifying.The head of the investigation, the German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, says he will not continue much beyond the end of his mandate that runs out on December 15, despite pleas from Lebanon and members of the UN Security Council. That has cast doubt on the future of a high-stakes probe, though UN officials say a new chief would be named quickly.
This week, after months of wrangling, the UN team started questioning five Syrians, including intelligence officers, in Austria's capital, Vienna. But the well-known heads of security branches are only part of the story. The investigators seek to talk to all the people mentioned in their interim report, six weeks ago, implicating a range of Syrians. They include a possible witness now known to be in a Syrian jail, only one of many who do not seem to be available for questioning or who have disappeared.
The plot laid out in the interim report implicated both Lebanon's and Syria's security agencies, naming some very senior members of Syria's governing elite including Assef Shawkat, President Assad's brother-in-law, who also heads military intelligence, and Maher Assad, the president's brother. Another witness who investigators may want to talk to again is a self-professed former Syrian intelligence agent in Lebanon, Hosam Taher Hosam, who last week suddenly turned up in Damascus where the authorities paraded him before the world media to undermine the credibility of the UN investigation. Mr Hosam stated that he had given false evidence, at times hooded to avoid detection, after having been threatened by Lebanese officials and after Mr Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, as well as Lebanon's interior ministry, had tried to bribe him. Mr Mehlis was not amused by the appearance. The whole affair smacked of the kind of "propaganda" he had witnessed in the Soviet-dominated former East Germany, he told Lebanese media. But he acknowledged Mr Hosam had been a witness.
None of this compares to the fog around the original mystery man: Ahmad Abu Adass, a devout young Palestinian living in Beirut who in a pre-recorded video message claimed that he carried out the suicide attack that killed Mr Hariri on February 14 for an unknown fundamentalist Islamic group. The investigation's interim report found no evidence that Mr Abu Adass drove the truck. He may have been used as a decoy by Lebanese and Syrian intelligence. Mr Adass disappeared mysteriously a month before the assassination, possibly in Syria. Investigators may also consider the possibility he ended up in a recently discovered mass grave near the former HQ of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon.
| Finding him there would be "unfortunate" for the Syrians |
Others say he frequented a Salafi mosque - a fundamentalist, often harshly anti-western strain of Islam. Mr Abu Adass may have wanted to fight in Iraq. That could be how he came into contact with Syrian intelligence, said by experts in Beirut to have been running the jihadi-smuggling network from Lebanon to Iraq, through Syria.
Ziad Ramadan could shed light on Mr Adass's intentions. A young Syrian and one of his best friends, he lived in Lebanon until this year. The interim UN report said investigators wanted to question Mr Ramadan but could not find him. It is now clear he is in jail in Syria.
| Or buried behind the jail |
Lebanon's government last week asked for a six-month extension of the UN investigation. Mr Mehlis may have sufficient evidence to name his Syrian suspects after the Vienna interrogations or in his December 15 report to the UN Security Council, marking a breakthrough. If not, it may well be left to another chief investigator to navigate the maze of intrigue that Hariri's killers have constructed.