Lebanon: UN says four Hezbollah soldiers killed Hariri

The UN-backed special court investigating the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri's murder yesterday published the 47-page indictment against four members of the Iranian-backed Shia militia Hezbollah for alleged involvement in the truck bombing that killed him in 2005.

While prosecutors analysed a vast network of telephone records to link the suspects to the assassination of Mr Hariri, the indictment reveals no clear smoking gun in the case.

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.

Hezbollah, Lebanon's most powerful political and military force, has denied involvement and said it will never turn over the suspects. Still, they could be tried in their absence.

The former prime minister Saad Hariri, son of the late leader, urged Hezbollah's leaders to hand over the suspects and co-operate with the tribunal. "What the Hezbollah leadership is asked to do is simply to declare cutting links between it and the accused. This will be a historic stance that all Arabs and Lebanese will remember," he said in a statement.

The indictment reveals details of the investigation into a case that has consumed Lebanon for six years. It says the assassins tracked Mr Hariri over several weeks to establish the movements of his convoy before the attack.

Prosecutors acknowledge they have no direct evidence linking the suspects, despite painstaking investigations. The file relies largely on circumstantial evidence "which works logically by inference and deduction", the indictment said.