Beirut: A Lebanese Cabinet minister yesterday urged a UN commission to summon Syria's foreign minister for comments in which he suggested that former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri had lied about being threatened by the Syrian president.
Telecommunications minister Marwan Hamadeh also said Foreign Minister Farouk Al Shar'a should stand trial, accusing him of misleading the commission that is investigating Hariri's assassination.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Al Shar'a had suggested Hariri lied to Lebanese politicians when he told them he was threatened by Syrian President Bashar Al Assad at a meeting on August 26, 2004.
Several politicians have testified to the commission that they were told that when Bashar informed Hariri of his decision to push for the extension of the Lebanese president's mandate, Bashar had allegedly threatened to "break Lebanon" over Hariri's head if he did not support the decision.
Survives assassination
The politicians, who include Hamadeh, said Hariri had told them of the meeting with Bashar after he returned to Beirut from the Syrian capital that day.
Hariri reluctantly voted for the three-year extension of President Emile Lahoud's term in September 2004, but he resigned as prime minister a month later. A few days before the resignation, Hamadeh survived an assassination attempt in a car bombing in Beirut.
On Wednesday, Al Shar'a said Hariri "was unable to justify" his acceptance of the extension of Lahoud's mandate and so he had claimed that he had been threatened by the Syrian president. "This is my opinion," Al Shar'a added. Hamadeh accused Al Shar'a of trying to mislead the UN investigation and said the commission should summon him.
"We warn about the continuous attempt to pressure and terrorise the international investigating committee," Hamadeh said in a statement. He added that Al Shar'a and others in the Syrian government should be put "in the dock in an international tribunal". Another leading politician, Walid Junblatt, the political head of Lebanon's Druze community, reacted to Al Shar'a's remarks by saying the Syrian foreign minister was a "bully" and accusing Syria of sending "poisonous, corrupt and immoral messages".
Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has been quoted as predicting that the Security Council will take steps against Syria in the New Year for its failure to cooperate with the commission on Hariri's killing.
In Damascus yesterday, some 1,000 Syrians staged a sit-in outside the UN offices to protest the international pressure on Syria. Waving Syrian flags, the protesters delivered a letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that said the commission's findings were politicised and biased.
The protesters delivered a petition that supports the letter which had been signed by 3.2 million Syrians. The petition filled 16 boxes. It took a month to collect the signatures from across Syria, a country of 17 million people. boxes combining the signatures of about 3.2 million Syrians to express rejection of international pressures on Syria.
