Suspect arrested in Hariri case

Lebanese have arrested a Sunni Muslim who according to a UN report telephoned President Emile Lahoud minutes before the murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri, officials said yesterday.

Mahmoud Abdel-Al, who is also member of the Islamic charity al-Ahbache that is believed to have strong links with Syria, was arrested on Saturday on the order of the Lebanon's top prosecutor Said Mirza, judicial sources said.

His detention is sure to wrench up the pressure even more on the embattled pro-Syrian Lahoud, who has faced impassioned calls from opponents to step down ever since the murder of the five-time premier in a February Beirut bomb blast.

The arrest is the first to be made over the murder since the report's publication on Thursday. However four other suspects, all seen as close to Lahoud, were arrested in August and are still held in custody.

The move is the latest twist in a dramatic sequence of events after UN investigators probing the assassination implicated security officials in both Lebanon and Syria over the crime in their report.

Lahoud, a Maronite Christian, on Friday was forced to deny the claims in the UN report that he received a call on his mobile phone from Abdel-Al minutes before the bomb blast.

According to the report, Abdel-Al phoned Lahoud at 12:47 local time from his own mobile, just minutes before the blast, and followed this call up at 12:49pm with one to Raymound Azar, the then head of Lebanese military intelligence.

Azar arrested over the murder in August along with three other close aides of Lahoud: presidential guard head, Mustafa Hamdan, former general security chief Jamil al-Sayed, ex-internal security head Ali al-Hage.

Mahmoud Abdel-Al is also the brother of another key suspect in the assassination, Ahmad Abdel-Al, who is a leading member of the al-Ahbache group.

A third brother works for the presidential guard.

On Saturday, the Lebanese Cabinet had hailed the report from the UN inquiry led by German prosecutor Detlev Mahlis but stopped short of calling for a trial by an international court.

Syria on Saturday it had cooperated fully with a UN probe into the assassination of a former Lebanese leader and accused anti-Syrian witnesses of lying to tie the Damascus regime to the murder.

Damascus to dispute a UN report that implicated Syrian and Lebanese officials in the Feb. 14 bombing that killed Hariri, a former prime minister and opponent of Syria's domination of his country, and 20 others in central Beirut.

"All that was contained in the report is based on presumptions and allegations," Syrian Foreign Ministry adviser Riyad Dawoodi said at a news conference. "There's no proof."

Hariri's provoked Lebanese to hold mass demonstrations against Syria's nearly three-decade military occupation and intensified international pressure on Damascus, leading to the regime withdrawing troops from its neighbor in April.

Dawoodi President Bashar Assad's government was "totally surprised at the talk of sanctions" being imposed by the UN Security Council and plans a series of diplomatic steps at the United Nations to present its own "reading" of the investigative report.

The US and France are readying resolutions critical of Syria for the Security Council, which is scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the report by the chief UN investigator, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.