Daily Star - La France affirme que Siddiq a disparu il y a un mois

Daily Star - France says Siddiq went missing a month ago, April 10, 2008

A key Syrian witness in the probe into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who has gone missing disappeared a month ago, officials in France said Wednesday.
"All we know is that he left his home on March 13," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
The comment came a day after Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced that French authorities no longer knew the whereabouts of Mohammad Zuheir as-Siddiq, who had been living in the Paris suburb of Chatou.
French police sources said Siddiq had not been under police surveillance, was not under house arrest and was able to come and go as he pleased.
Siddiq's brother, in a Syrian newspaper interview published on Wednesday, accused France of having either killed the witness or helped others do so. "The French authorities helped facilitate the disappearance of Mohammad Zuheir al-Siddiq with the aim of his being liquidated by another party or they liquidated him themselves," Imad as-Sadiq told the Syrian daily Al-Watan.
"My brother was under the protection of French authorities," he told Al-Watan, which is close to the Syrian government.
Siddiq, who lives in Damascus, accused "Lebanese parties," including Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh, of having plotted "with the French to kill [my] brother."
"The assassins want the finger of blame to be pointed at Syria, on the basis that it was the only party to benefit from his disappearance."
Daniel Bellemare, the head of the UN panel probing the Hariri murder, said Tuesday that Siddiq "is not in our custody, has never asked to be entered in [our] witness protection program."
Siddiq, who was wanted by an international arrest warrant requested by a Lebanese prosecutor, was detained in October 2005 in a Paris suburb in connection with the February 2005 assassination of Hariri.
France refused to extradite him to Lebanon because it was not given guarantees he would not be sentenced to death here if convicted of a crime.
Newspaper reports in 2006 quoted Siddiq as saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad and his then-Lebanese counterpart, Emile Lahoud, ordered the Hariri assassination in a massive car bombing. He subsequently withdrew the accusation.
The political crisis that has rattled the country since the murder is widely seen as an extension of the regional confrontation pitting the United States and its Saudi ally against Iran and Syria.
Bellemare on Tuesday cautioned against expecting early indictments and urged the Security Council to give his team more time to complete its work.
"While the preparatory steps for the establishment of the special tribunal [that will try suspects in the case] are continuing, I would request this distinguished council to consider extending the mandate of this commission beyond" next June 15, Daniel Bellemare told the 15-member body.
South Africa's UN ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, the council chair this month, later told reporters that members generally welcomed Bellemare's request for a six-month extension as well as the progress made in the probe.
In his first appearance before the council since he took office last January, the Canadian former prosecutor also disclosed that indictments in the case would not be filed immediately after the UN-backed tribunal is established.
He said the time gap ideally "should be as short as possible" but he insisted that "the admissible evidence will have to be carefully and objectively considered in light of the applicable prosecution threshold."
"No one can predict or dictate how long this process will take," Bellemare said, stressing that he wanted to "send the clear message that the search for justice cannot be rushed: it must follow its course."
Bellemare also sought to clarify points made in a UN report released late last month indicating a "criminal network" of individuals acted together to carry out the Hariri slaying.
"The direction of the investigation has not changed and the commission is still investigating crimes that are politically motivated," he said.
"What is new this time is that we now have the evidence of the existence of such a network and of its links," he added.
Bellemare was meanwhile asked by Russian UN delegate Ilya Rogachev why four Lebanese former security chiefs have been in jail for almost three years in connection with the Hariri murder even though they have not been indicted.
The UN chief investigator replied that the decision to detain Jamil al-Sayyed, the former head of Lebanese state security, and three others had been made "by Lebanese judicial authorities according to Lebanese criminal law."
"It is not for me to second-guess their decision," he said, adding that he had discussed the case with Lebanon's prosecutor general but could not give details due to the confidential nature of their exchanges.
In a statement on Wednesday, Sayyed said he had sent a letter through Investigating Judge Saqr Saqr to Public Prosecutor Saeed Mirza, holding them both responsible for what he calls the ongoing "judicial mockery" of the case of Siddiq, the main witness in the case.
"They also bear responsibility for any assassination attempt against Siddiq," Sayyed said.
"Saqr and Mirza granted Siddiq the freedom to move between different countries, despite the fact that former head of the International Independent Investigation Committee Judge Detlev Mehlis considered him the main suspect in the Hariri assassination," Sayyed added.