Syria slams UN over resolution

The Syrian government paper Tishrin said yesterday that Damascus would fully cooperate with international probes into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in the wake of the UN resolution demanding full Syrian cooperation.

At the same time, the government paper was critical of the UN Security Council resolution.

"The Security Council resolution is more political than judicial," Tishrin said in an editorial.

But it added that Syria would "cooperate to the farthest limits with the international organizations and its various committees, because Syria was still working transparently to apply the international law and to achieve peace and security in the region."

The paper called on the international community to help Syria in following up the investigations "to reach the hoped-for results ... which is the unveiling of the real criminals in Hariri's murder."

The editorial follows the UN resolution which demanded Syrian cooperation after a UN investigation blasted Damascus for what was called only "limited" cooperation and accused Syria of providing "false and inaccurate" information to the UN probe.

The Foreign Ministry said "It [the resolution] is accusatory and adopts the assumptions that [chief UN investigator Detlev] Mehlis had arrived at which we consider hasty and not objective enough."

This came one day after Syria's foreign minister had gone before the UN Security Council and angrily rejected the resolution

Foreign diplomats had expressed shock on Monday at Farouk al-Sharaa's response to the resolution that threatened possible "further measures" if Syria doesn't start cooperating fully with the probe into the Feb. 14 bombing that killed Rafik Hariri and 20 others. They said his statement underscored Syria's isolation and highlighted the necessity for the warning to Damascus.

The resolution, co-sponsored by the US, Britain and France, requires Syria to detain anyone whom UN investigators consider a suspect in Hariri's assassination. The investigators, led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, had concluded that Hariri's slaying was unlikely to have occurred without senior Syrian approval.