May 25, 2010 - Brisbane Times - No guarantee Hariri assassins will face court, says Kaldas

GEESCHE JACOBSEN CRIME EDITOR

AFTER 12 months of investigations into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, no one has been charged and four high-ranking generals considered suspects have been allowed to go free.

The NSW Police Deputy Commissioner, Nick Kaldas, who served as chief investigator of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon established by the UN to investigate the Hariri assassination, said there was no guarantee there would be prosecutions.

He is confident, however, that the whole picture of the incident in which a car bomb killed Hariri and 22 others, will soon emerge.

It had been widely believed that Syria was behind the assassination, but more recently the Shiite militant group Hezbollah is believed to be implicated.

''What I can say is the evidence and material and information the tribunal gathers will eventually be placed by the prosecutor where it ought to go,'' Mr Kaldas said. ''It's his decision whether it needs to go to a court or some other forum. There are a number of options open to him.

''I would not say there is certainty that it will be a prosecution. It could go quite a number of ways.''

But a case like this, so intensely political, is not without pitfalls. Opinion in Lebanon is divided between those who want the tribunal to succeed and those who want it to stop investigating.

The intense public interest and scrutiny of his work surprised him, Mr Kaldas, a NSW former homicide investigator, said.

The tribunal was set up to end the ''culture of impunity'' where political killings go unpunished, he said.

''A human being along with a number of other innocent victims were assassinated. This is simply about finding out what happened and bringing to justice those who were responsible.''

While he was away, Mr Kaldas missed out on the job as the head of the Australian Federal Police, but said he has no regrets.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald