Middle East Focus: Sherlock Holmes vs. Poirot in Lebanon: the Hariri STL Legal and Political Non-Event………….

Arabia Deserta

Sherlock Holmes vs. Poirot in Lebanon: the Hariri STL Legal and Political Non-Event………….

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF
“Prosecutors analyzed a vast network of telephone records to link four Hezbollah members to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, but there is no clear smoking gun in the case, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday. The U.N.-backed special court investigating Hariri's murder published the 47-page indictment against four members of the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah for alleged involvement in the deadly truck bombing that killed Hariri in 2005. The publication comes after the Special Tribunal for Lebanon said last week that Lebanese authorities had been unable to arrest the four suspects or serve them with their indictments…………The blast killed Hariri, eight members of his convoy and 13 passers-by along with the suicide bomber, a man whose identity has not been established. It wounded 231 people. Prosecutors acknowledge in the indictment's preamble that they have no direct evidence linking the suspects to the attack, despite years of painstaking investigations.………….”

The indictment said: “The file relies to a large extent on circumstantial evidence which works logically by inference and deduction,". Inference and deduction are what Perry Mason, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple did in novels. They only work in the novels and in films because the suspect usually concedes and screams “mea culpa”. It doesn’t happen that way in real life: what Perry and Poirot and Marple “infer and deduct” is never court material. Now Sherlock Holmes, he relied more on real evidence: the Hariri STL should have hired Sherlock Holmes, or at Least Robert Downey Jr.
Some may claim that Holmes was good because he was often “high”, but so are most Hollywood stars. (FYI: most Lebanese are never high, at least they don’t act or talk like it).
These indictments are probably the most important “non-event” in Lebanon this year (everybody has been expecting them for months). Which also makes them the least important “event”. Hezbollah, of course, will not hand over these men, which could mean that they are guilty but not necessarily so (the STL work has been messy, clumsy, and often downright suspicious). Nobody in the whole Middle East cares for them one way or another, except the remnants of March 14 movement (Hariri), Saudi media, and one division of the U.S State Department. As for the rest of the Arab world: you ask an Egyptian or a an Algerian or Moroccan about it and they would probably ask "Who is Hariri?".
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com