To imagine the two leaders hugging was impossible just a year ago. Hariri, son of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, placed the blame for his father’s 2005 Valentines Day massacre squarely on the shoulders of Bashar Assad. In an interview following the release of the Mehlis report by UN Special Prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, the younger Hariri related a conversation with his father who had just returned from a meeting with President Assad in Syria over the extension of President Emile LaHoud’s term in office. Saad said:
I discussed with my father, the late Rafik Hariri, the extension of President Lahoud’s term. He told me that President Bashar Assad threatened him saying: “This is what I want. If you think that President Chirac and you are going to run Lebanon, you are mistaken. It is not going to happen. President Lahoud is me. Whatever I tell him, he follows suit. This extension is to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and Walid Jumblat’s. So, you either do as you are told or we will get you and your family wherever you are.”
Just days later, the former prime minister was killed, along with 21 others, in a massive car bomb explosion.
What does Hariri the Younger say now? According to the Mehlis report:
Hariri, who for years blamed Syria for his father’s death, dropped a bombshell on Monday when he told the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that it was a mistake to accuse Syria in the giant truck bomb that killed ex-Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri along with 21 others near the St George Hotel on the Beirut waterfront on Feb. 14, 2005, claiming that the charge was politically motivated.
"This was a political accusation, and this political accusation has finished,” Hariri said in the interview while emphasizing that the determination of his father’s killers lies in the hands of the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) set up to probe the crime.
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