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Appeals judges at the Lebanon Tribunal on Thursday convicted another two men of several counts of terrorism and murder for playing a role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, reversing an earlier acquittal.
“The appeals chamber had unanimously decided to reverse the acquittals (…) we unanimously find misters (Hassan Habib) Merhi and (Hussein Hassan) Oneissi guilty,” presiding Judge Ivana Hrdlickova said in a summary of the judgement read out in court.
The prosecution had appealed against the acquittal of the two men, saying there had been fundamental errors in the judgment.
In 2020 a lower trial chamber already convicted a former member of the Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, Salim Jamil Ayyash, for the bombing that killed veteran Sunni Muslim politician Hariri.
All three men have been tried in absentia and remain at large.
A huge blast on February 14, 2005, killed Hariri and 21 others and injured 226. The bomb left a 11-metre-wide crater.
Hariri’s assassination plunged Lebanon into what was then its worst crisis since its 1975-90 civil war, setting the stage for years of confrontation between rival political forces. The attack triggered mass protests that drove Syrian forces out of Lebanon after three decades. Hariri had opposed the Syrian presence in Lebanon.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters, AP and AFP)
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