The case went to trial in a country far from the crime scene with none of the accused in custody. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars and relied on teams of investigators and lawyers.
But when the verdict on the most consequential political assassination in Lebanon’s recent history arrived on Tuesday, to many in Lebanon, it fell far short of the crime.
For a huge suicide car bomb attack in Beirut in 2005 that rattled the Middle East and killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Netherlands convicted one man of participating in a conspiracy to carry it out.
Three other defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence. And if the man convicted, Salim Jalil Ayyash, is ever caught, the court will have to try him all over again since he was tried in absentia.
Thelong-awaited verdict came from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was created in 2009 at the behest of the United Nations Security Council. Many Lebanese who had hoped that an international inquiry would reveal — and punish — those responsible for the crime and break the country’s cycle of impunity for political killings found themselves deeply disappointed.
“On these two counts, the process failed,” said Nadim Houry, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative.
It is unlikely that Mr. Ayyash will ever be found, he said, and in any case, he was “a cog in the system,” not the attack’s mastermind.
“It’s like in 9/11 if you name the hijackers and not Bin Laden,” Mr. Houry said. “This was way above Ayyash’s pay grade.”
The court announced the verdicts after hourslong statements from its judges summarizing the case and the arguments of the prosecution and defense teams.
The court deemed the killing a politically motivated terrorist act and described all four defendants — Mr. Ayyash, Hassan Habib Merhi, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hassan Sabra — as supporters of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group and political party backed by Iran and allied with neighboring Syria. But it said it found no evidence of direct involvement in the attack by Hezbollah or the Syrian government, which dominated Lebanon’s politics at the time of the attack.
In the end, the court did not answer the question of who ordered the killing.
Saad Hariri, the son of the assassinated politician and himself a former prime minister of Lebanon, was present in the courtroom when the verdict was read, and later made a brief, somewhat ambiguous statement to reporters: “Justice must still be done, regardless of how long it takes.”
He did not elaborate, but his statement appeared to reflect the caution of a politician who will have to work together with Hezbollah, now Lebanon’s most powerful political force.
Months before he was assassinated in 2005, the elder Hariri, a wealthy businessman and Lebanon’s dominant Sunni Muslim politician, had ended his fifth term as prime minister in anger at Syria’s continuing interference in his country, including the presence. of Syrian troops.
According to his associates, Mr. Hariri had recently clashed with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, but had decided to run again for office.
After he was killed, general suspicion fell on Syria, although Syria denied any role. The brazen attack, in central Beirut, brought more than a million protesters into the streets, and the outcry combined with international pressure forced Syria to withdraw its troops.
In reading a summary of their 2,600-page ruling, the judges described the political context behind the killing.
The murder plan, they said, relied on a massive load of high-grade explosives, and was intended to cause “fear and panic” that would resonate throughout Lebanon and the region. “It was designed to destabilize Lebanon,” the summary said.
In the ruling, the judges seemed to chide the prosecutors for falling short in making their case against the accused. They also said the prosecution had offered no evidence that Hezbollah’s senior leadership was involved in the attack.
“Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr. Hariri and some of his political allies, however there was no evidence that the Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr. Hariri’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it,’‘ said Judge David Re, reading from the summary.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has repeatedly dismissed the tribunal as a tool of its enemies and has threatened to go after any followers who cooperated with it. “The tribunal means nothing to us and its rulings are of no value,” he said at the time of the trial.
The key figure among the suspects, prosecutors said, was Mustafa Amine Badreddinne, a veteran of Hezbollah’s special operations, and close to its top leaders. The case against him ended when Mr. Badreddinne was killed in Syria in 2016.
On Tuesday, the judges said they were not provided with enough convincing details of Mr. Badredinne’s role.
To critics of the tribunal, the prosecution of a few low-level Hezbollah operatives is a far cry from the findings of United Nations investigators who were sent to Beirut soon after the assassination.
In a report, these investigators called the killing an elaborate professional conspiracy that required “substantial logistical support,” considerable financing and “military precision in its execution.”
Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor who led a second inquiry, ended a six-month investigation in 2005 with a list of close to 20 suspects, including several senior Lebanese and top Syrian officials.
Diplomats said at the time that Mr. Mehlis had reluctantly ended his mission because he had been warned about two assassination plots against him. At least two Lebanese police officers who assisted the tribunal’s investigations have been killed.
Lacking reliable insider witnesses, prosecutors built their case largely on circumstantial evidence, much of it extensive records of cellphones used in proximity to one another as operatives covertly tracked Mr. Hariri’s movements for weeks.
They included brief calls, prosecutors said, as the Hariri convoy left the parliament area and moved toward the fatal ambush near Beirut’s waterfront.
The court-appointed defense lawyers had all asked for acquittals, saying there was no proof beyond reasonable doubt that their clients had used the cellphones in question. Electronic records of hundreds of calls could reveal location, date and time, the lawyers argued, but they did not confirm the identity of the users because there were no voice recordings or intercepts and only a few text messages.
The verdict was originally scheduled for Aug. 7, but was postponed after the massive chemical explosion in the port of Beirut, which killed more than 170 people, injured some 6,000 and destroyed a large part of the city.
Questions have been raised about the cost of the court’s 400-strong staff, including a roster of prosecutors and 11 full-time judges who were involved in the case.
Half of its $60 million annual budget has been paid by Lebanon, with help from Saudi Arabia, and half by voluntary contributions from Western countries and Arab Gulf states. For many critics, this enormous expense has not justified the symbolism of an absentee trial.
Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hezbollah at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he shared the frustration about the absentee suspects.
But he said he saw an upside for victims, their families and for Lebanon, citing what he called a “professional, impartial, third-party prosecution.”
The trial may have achieved “something important,” he said, by “holding Hezbollah publicly accountable for an act of terrorism targeting fellow Lebanese citizens.”
Kareem Chehayeb contributed reporting.
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