The two men were tried in absentia. It is therefore unlikely that they are truly incarcerated, because Hezbollah refused to put any suspect and recognize the United Nations Special Court for Lebanon.
Le Monde with AFP
The United Nations Special Court for Lebanon (TSL) sentenced in absentia on Thursday, June 16, in perpetuity prison two members of Hezbollah for an attack committed in 2005 which caused the death of 22 people including the former Lebanese Prime Minister RAFIC HARII.
“The Appeal Chamber decides unanimously to condemn Mr. (Habib) Merhi and Mr. (Hussein) Oneissi to life imprisonment, the heaviest sentence provided for by the status and the regulation” of the court of the court of the court of the court of the court ” , said the president of the TSL, Ivana Hrdlickova.
The court deemed them guilty on appeal on March 10, canceling their acquittal. They were notably guilty of conspiracy appeal to commit an act of terrorism and complicity in intentional homicide.
“particularly odious” crimes and “extreme gravity”
The two men were “fully aware that the bombing project in the heart of Beirut would kill Rafic Hariri” and other people, raised judge Ivana Hrdlickova. They acted with premeditation and were guilty of crimes of an “extreme gravity” and “particularly odious” who “plunged the Lebanese people into a state of terror”, she added.
It is unlikely that the two men be truly incarcerated, because the Hezbollah Shiite movement refused to put any suspect and recognize the court which judged all the suspects in absentia, including Salim Ayyash, already sentenced to perpetuity in perpetuity 2020.
Rafic Hariri, who was the Lebanese Prime Minister until his resignation in October 2004, was killed, in February 2005, when a suicide bomber blew a van filled with explosives on the passage of his armored convoy in Beirut , killing 21 other people and making 226 injured.
The attack sparked demonstrations that driven Syria from Lebanon after a twenty-nine-year-old military deployment. After the departure of the Syrian army, the current hostile to Damascus, led by Saad Hariri, son of Rafic Hariri, had won the legislative elections of 2005 and 2009.
The UN court dedicated to disappear
It may well be falling from the curtain for the TSL, which sits near the Hague, in the Netherlands. Threatened with disappearance for lack of funding, the court should close at the end of this trial. Since its opening, in 2009, after a resolution of the UN Security Council, the cost of the TSL, responsible for judging the accused of the attack, has been estimated between 600 million and a billion dollars.
At the end of the trial at first instance, the court had sentenced Salim Ayyash in 2020 but estimated that there was not enough evidence to condemn the other accused, Assad Sabra, Hussein Oneissi and Hassan Habib Merhi . The accusation had appealed the acquittals of the last two.
The file shows a large number of exchanges with various mobile phones used by the convicts in the hours who followed the assassination of Mr. Hariri. The three convicts are still on the run, the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, having refused to give them to the court. Another trial against Salim Ayyash for a series of attacks on several politicians has been canceled, for lack of liquidity.