A man claiming to be a former Syrian intelligence agent in Lebanon has said on Syrian state television that Lebanese officials tortured him and offered bribes to persuade him to present false testimony against Syria to a UN commission investigating the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
The man, Hussam Taher Hussam, said he had been held in Lebanon by supporters of Saad Hariri, the son of the former prime minister, and subjected to torture and drug injections to force him to testify.
Saad Hariri, he said, offered him US$1.3 million if he would lie about senior Syrian officials. Hussam did not say whether he had accepted any money.
Hussam, a slim, bespectacled Syrian Kurd, looked composed and unemotional as he spoke on a program originally broadcast on Sunday.
False evidence
He said that Hariri and his associates had asked him to tell investigators that he had seen a truck used in the assassination at a Syrian military camp, and to present false evidence implicating Maher Assad, the younger brother of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Asef Shawkat, the president's brother-in-law, in the killing in February.
"It was a ploy," Hussam said, adding that Hariri and his associates were desperate to accuse Syria. Syria agreed last week to allow five of its intelligence officials to travel to Vienna to be interviewed by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor leading the inquiry. His findings are to be presented to the Security Council in mid-December.
In an interim version of the report, released last month, he presented evidence that strongly suggested that high-level Syrian officials were involved in planning the assassination.
Hussam was not identified as a witness in the interim report. However, the commission issued a statement confirming that he was a witness, saying he had come forward voluntarily.
Revenge
He told investigators several times that he feared that Syrian authorities would take revenge on him or his family, the statement said.
Saad Hariri's office issued a statement denying that there had ever been any contact between Hussam and Hariri or any of his associates.
Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, said that Hussam's TV appearance was widely mocked in Lebanon as a clumsy attempt by President Assad and his allies to discredit the investigation.
"The image that pops up in my mind is from Maoist China," Fawaz said. "Mao used to bring people forward and force them to publicly denounce themselves, and that's exactly what's happening now in Syria."
But Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma historian who is in Syria on a Fulbright research fellowship, said that Hussam's story was playing well.
"Everyone in Syria is watching it, and they're very excited," he said. "They love this stuff. They want to believe it."
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS