THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — A special appeals chamber of a United Nations tribunal sentenced two men to life in prison on Thursday for the 2005 assassination that killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon gave both Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Hassan Habib Merhi the maximum penalty for their roles in the suicide bomb attack which killed Hariri and 22 others as his convoy drove along a seaside road in Beirut.
“The attack terrorized not only the direct victims but more generally the people of Lebanon,” Presiding Judge Ivana Hrdlickova said when reading the verdict. The men were found guilty in March of committing a terrorist act and murder.
The ad-hoc tribunal, created by the U.N. in 2009 to investigate the tragedy, has now convicted three men for planning the attack. Oneissi and Merhi were initially acquitted in 2020 but the court reversed course after prosecutors appealed. Their whereabouts are unknown though they are believed to be in Syria.
Hariri, a Lebanese business tycoon, became the country’s first prime minister following a 15-year civil war. His six-car convoy was traveling from a café en route to his home along a seaside road in Beirut on Valentine’s Day 2005 when a Mitsubishi van packed with 4,000 pounds of TNT exploded nearby. He had opposed ongoing pressure from Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to include members of Hezbollah in the government.
Five men in total were charged, marking the first time the crime of terrorism has been prosecuted in an international tribunal. One man was killed in Damascus in 2016 and prosecutors declined to appeal the acquittal of another man, seeing the evidence as too weak. Based in the Netherlands due to security concerns in Lebanon, the U.N. court found no evidence for the involvement of the Syrian government or Hezbollah leadership in the 2005 attack.
The tribunal has faced widespread criticism. All of the men were tried in absentia, a first for an international court since the post-World War II Nuremberg trials. Originally given a three-year mandate and predicted to cost $120 million, the tribunal has come under fire for both its expenses and slow pace. The investigation and trial have taken over 15 years and cost more than $1 billion. The court was on the brink of shutting its doors after the initial verdict was reached in 2020, but donors stepped in to ensure the appeal could be seen through. It’s unclear if Oneissi and Merhi will be able to appeal their sentences.
The tribunal announced in 2020 that it would investigate three more suicide bombing attacks on Lebanese politicians between 2004 and 2005, but given its financial problems, that investigation is stalled.
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