Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Mehlis credibility questioned

SERIOUS questions are being raised about the credibility of the report prepared by UN investigator and German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on his findings on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
Critics see Mehlis as closely aligned with the US from the mid-80s when he investigated the 1986 bombing of an East Berlin nightclub, La Belle, frequented by American service personnel. Mehlis determined that Libya was behind the blast while evidence that turned up later indicated that Libya could have been falsely charged.
A former operative of Israel's Mossad secret agency revealed that the key evidence cited by Mehlis — intercepted radio communication between Tripoli, Libya, and purported Libyan agents in Europe — orignated from a trasnmitter planted in Tripoli and operated by Mossad. That revelation came too late to exenorate Libya from the East Berlin blast; two people, said to be Libyan agents, were tried, convicted and sentenced by a German court.
However, the Mossad connection was said to have been known to Mehlis, who critics say deliberately depressed that information in his report about the East Berlin blasts at the behest of the US, which wanted to trap Libya in the case.
As Berlin public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and German intelligence interests in the 1986 tattack; actively built a selective politically-motivated case against suspects without objective material proof; while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with documented connections to western secret services. This background fundamentally challenges the credibility of his investigation of the Hariri assassination, says by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the London-based Institute for Policy Research & Development.
y German public television Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) said in August 1998 that h several leading suspects in the Berlin disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by western intelligence services. These included a group of terrorists led by “Mahmoud” Abu Jaber, a man “particularly involved in the preparation of the La Belle attack.” The group lived in East Berlin and met almost daily with the official suspects who were defendants in the court proceedings. According to Russian and East German intelligence services, the grou