Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Guardian vs The United Nations

     Written soon after the killing of Lebanese Prime Minister R Hariri, this Guardian UK articles includes lots of seemingly relevant details dismissed in the UN report, with the shakiest of reasons, contradicted by the facts as presented by the Guardian. 

178. A number of sources, confidential and otherwise, provided information to UNIIIC on the role and whereabouts of Mr. Abu Adass. Although the information provided has not been independently verified, significantly, none of this source information supported the theory that he was a lone suicide bomber acting for an Islamic fundamentalist group. Indeed, all of the source information pointed to the likelihood of Mr. Abu Adass being used by the Syrian and Lebanese authorities as a scapegoat for the crime, rather than being the instigator of crime himself. For example, one witness claimed to have seen Mr. Abu Adass in the hallway outside of General Ghazali's office in December 2004 in Anjar. Another witness claimed that Mr. Abu Adass was currently held in prison in Syria and will be killed once this investigation is over. According to him, Mr. Abu Adass had no role in the assassination except as a decoy, and the videotape was recorded at gunpoint approximately 45 days before the assassination. He later stated that General Assef Shawkat forced Mr. Abu Adass to record the tape approximately 15 days before the assassination in Damascus. He also stated that the tape was given to Al-Jazeera by a woman with the nickname "Um Alaa." Another witness stated that the day after the assassination Faysal Al-Rasheed insisted that the case had been solved and the perpetrator was Mr. Abu Adass, as a suicide bomb and that Mr. Abu Adass's body was still at the crime scene. Zuhir Saddik stated that in early February 2005, he had seen Mr. Abu Adass at the Zabadane training camp in Syria, and that his information was that Mr. Abu Adass had initially planned to commit the assassination but had changed his mind at the last minute. He said that Mr. Abu Adass was subsequently killed by the Syrians, and his body was placed in the vehicle containing the bomb, and thus was destroyed in the crime scene.

     Based on that, you can see, the Syrians have killed Adass, have him in jail, killed him and then put him in the exploding van, made him make a videotape at gunpoint, and have entertained him in the offices of the Generals, and was in a training camp.  All hearsay, much of it contradictory.

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