1. Ahmad Abu Adass
In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home.
It was there, after a prayer session, that a man approached him. His name was Mohammed, he said. He was born a Muslim, but his parents died when he was young, and he grew up in a Christian orphanage. Now he wanted to return to Islam, learn how to pray, marry a Muslim woman. Could Adass help him? Adass said he could, and the two men became friends.
On Jan. 15, 2005, Mohammed called Adass. He said he had a surprise for him. Would he come see? The next morning, a car pulled up in front of Adass’s home, and he got in. He told his parents he’d return soon to help them clean the carpets, as he had promised. He took nothing with him. A day later, Mohammed called Adass’s family. He told them Adass was going to Iraq and hinted that the purpose of the journey was to join the Sunni fighters there. He said Adass would not see them again.
Four weeks later, on Feb. 14, 2005, at 12:55 p.m., an explosion just in front of the St. Georges Hotel shook downtown Beirut. It destroyed a convoy of vehicles carrying Lebanon’s former and probably next prime minister, Rafik Hariri, killing him along with eight members of his entourage and 13 bystanders.
Soon after the blast, an anonymous caller claiming to represent “Nusra and Jihad Group in Greater Syria,” a previously unheard-of organization, told a reporter at the Al Jazeera affiliate in Beirut that a videotape from the suicide bomber was hanging from a tree in Riad al Solh Square, just a few blocks from the scene of the attack. If it was not picked up within 15 minutes, it would disappear. An Al Jazeera technician retrieved it, but Al Jazeera didn’t broadcast its contents immediately. At 5:04 p.m., the anonymous caller phoned again and told the reporter that he should broadcast the video right away or he “would regret it.” Shortly afterward, the tape was aired.
In the recording, a haggard Ahmad Abu Adass, dressed in black and sporting a beard and a white turban, read from a sheet of paper. In the name of Allah, he said, and to avenge the “innocent martyrs who were killed by the security forces of the infidel Saudi regime,” his group swore “to inflict just punishment upon the agent of that regime and its cheap tool in greater Syria, the sinner and holder of ill-gotten gains,” Rafik Hariri. A letter from the hitherto-unknown movement was attached to the tape. It clarified that Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, had to die because he had betrayed his fellow Sunnis, and that Adass, also a Sunni Muslim, was the bomber who killed him. Adass’s family was horrified by the confession. They didn’t believe it.
The United Nations sent a team of experts to help with the investigation. Forensic analysts from the Netherlands began to reassemble what remained of the bomber’s flatbed truck, a Mitsubishi Canter. They were able to make out its block number, 4D33-J01926, and established that the truck had been stolen in Japan, shipped to the United Arab Emirates and finally purchased, just before the attack, from a used-car dealer in Tripoli, Lebanon, a stronghold of Sunni Muslim movements, some of them identified with Al Qaeda.
Interviewed by the United Nations investigators in Tripoli, the dealer explained that two men came to his shop and, after arguing the price down by $250, paid $11,250 in $100 and $50 bills. They provided false names and phone numbers for the paperwork; it was probably not a coincidence that they picked a dealership with no security cameras. It all seemed clear: yet another suicide bombing by Sunni jihadists.
But the investigators remained puzzled, and not just by the oddity of gentle Ahmad Abu Adass suddenly deciding to commit mass murder. Experts who examined his taped confession noted that the tone and production did not match those of other Sunni jihadist tapes. They found subtle discrepancies, too, between the tape and the letter, as if someone had feared that the tape, perhaps made long before the incident, was not totally convincing and wanted to flesh out the story. Then there was the question of means. The driver of the Mitsubishi truck was evidently skilled; he had reached the Hariri motorcade with incredible precision despite heavy traffic in downtown Beirut. Adass, his family and friends all agreed, had never driven a car. He couldn’t even ride a bicycle.
Finally, there was the problem of the DNA evidence. Forensic experts collected hundreds of body parts at the site, and most were identified as belonging to Hariri, members of his entourage and other known victims. Some 100 samples were genetically compatible with one another, but not with the identified victims. The scatter pattern of those parts showed that they belonged to the person closest to the explosion. This was the suicide bomber. Investigators compared this DNA to genetic material in scrapings from Adass’s toothbrush. The results were unambiguous: Adass was not the bomber.
The United Nations team called in more experts, genetic specialists who subjected the remains to isotope analysis — a process that can determine where a person has been living, what he has been eating, the air he has been breathing. They concluded that the bomber spent the last six months of his life in combat or active military training, where his body absorbed large quantities of lead. The largest body part to be found was his nose, the shape of which led some investigators to believe that he came from Ethiopia, Somalia or Yemen. A senior investigator, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about his own safety, said the investigation team preserved the nose in formalin.
“I sat and looked at that nose,” the investigator told me. “I said to myself: ‘Whose nose are you? Who sent you to kill Hariri? Why did he try so hard to make the world think the suicide bomber was someone else?’ ”
2. The Tribunal
“Whose nose are you?” Answering this macabre question has since become the work of one of the most expensive, significant and controversial criminal investigations ever conducted. The United Nations established the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague for pursuing the investigation, and prosecutors filed indictments in 2011 against four members of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful militant organization, and in 2013 against a fifth member. In one sense, the tribunal is necessary simply because of Hezbollah’s unique role in Lebanon and the world: Although the group is classified by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terrorist organization, it is also a popular political party in Lebanon, and therefore it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for Lebanon or any other single nation to provide an appropriate venue for its prosecution. But more is at stake. This is the first major international trial involving the Arab world, and one of the greatest challenges for the prosecutors and the defense lawyers alike is simply to show that justice is possible.
The tribunal’s five trial judges began hearing the case of The Prosecutor v. Ayyash, Badreddine, Merhi, Oneissi and Sabra on Jan. 16, 2014. After a full year of proceedings, they have heard and seen just a fraction of the hundreds of witnesses and thousands of exhibits the prosecutors intend to present. So far, 28 countries, including Lebanon, the United States and France, have contributed roughly half a billion dollars to fund an investigation and trial that will probably cost hundreds of millions more by the time the case is closed, most likely in two to three years. If convicted of all the charges — various acts of terror, 22 counts of murder, 231 counts of attempted murder — the defendants face life in prison in a nation to be determined by the presiding judge.
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Two of the personal phones Issa used traveled all over Lebanon in absolute synchronicity with the green phone number 3140023, the phone belonging to the supreme leader of the Hariri assassination cell network. The personal phones were also used to make multiple calls to Hezbollah numbers.
The prosecution says that on the night before the attack, Badreddine, Ayyash and Merhi were in continual contact, presumably tying up loose ends before the operation. Badreddine also had the Issa phones with him. At roughly 2 a.m., a text message was sent to one of these, 3966663, by one of Issa’s girlfriends. He replied teasingly at 2:31 a.m.: “If you knew where I have been, you would be very upset.”
It’s hard to tell whether Issa is confessing to infidelity or to something far worse — realizing what she, a Sunni Muslim, would have thought if she knew. Either way, this text message shows that even amid the intense pressure of finalizing preparations for one of his biggest operations, Badreddine finds time to kid around with a girlfriend.
The next day, at two minutes before noon, just before the attack, Ayyash’s green phone called Badreddine’s green phone from very near the St. Georges Hotel. The call lasted 14 seconds. This was the last call on the green network. A short time after that, the prosecution claims, Badreddine made several calls to unidentified numbers, using another one of his phones. Information obtained by the tribunal’s investigators indicates that he spoke to Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s supreme military commander, possibly to get the final authorization to act. Later on that day, in a manner very uncharacteristic of Badreddine, all of his phones fell silent for two hours.
8. The Indictment
In 2009, the United Nations team decided that it couldn’t make any more progress inside Lebanon. It packed all of the evidence, including the burned remains of six vehicles, onto cargo planes and flew it to the Netherlands. The Security Council established the tribunal, and the investigation team was absorbed into the tribunal’s prosecution team.
Hezbollah remained intransigent. On Jan. 12, 2011, Hezbollah demanded that Saad Hariri, Rafik’s son and the prime minister of Lebanon at the time, rebuff the tribunal’s efforts. When he refused to hold an emergency cabinet meeting, Hezbollah’s ministers withdrew from the cabinet and the government collapsed. Lebanon was back on the brink of civil war, and experts were predicting that if indictments were issued, Hezbollah would not hold back. Several Arab leaders flew into Beirut to calm the situation. It helped, at least for the time being.
Later that month, the lead prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, filed an indictment but did not disclose the names of the accused. In June, he released four names. (Merhi would be indicted in 2013.) As the indictments were being finalized, the U.N. team sent arrest warrants to the Lebanese government. Interpol issued “Red Notice” warrants at the same time. It came as no surprise when the Lebanese authorities reported that they could not capture the suspects. Tribunal personnel criticize — sharply in off-the-record interviews and diplomatically in official documents — the government’s inability to control Hezbollah. (You can sympathize with the actual politicians charged with bringing such an organization to heel, though. Early this month, I saw the current prime minister of Lebanon, Tammam Salam, at a security conference in Munich. He told me that the work of the Hariri tribunal was “important and serious” and that his government was following it closely, but he also declined to say anything more specific.)
According to information obtained by the tribunal, sometime in 2009, when Hezbollah learned of the mounting evidence against its operatives, Hussein Mahadawi, the chief representative of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, instructed them to lower their profiles and try even harder to vanish. The only one who didn’t comply was Badreddine, who refused to give up his luxurious lifestyle and went on using his Sami Issa identity.
For all the seeming absurdity of a murder trial in absentia, the investigation and trial have succeeded in causing substantial damage to Hezbollah. The identities of some of its leading operatives have been exposed, and those men will need to continue taking extra measures to remain in hiding. Tribunal personnel are convinced that because of their investigation, Hezbollah has already stopped using public cell networks in favor of closed ones, a move that has made their operational functions more unwieldy and complicated.
In the long term, Hezbollah’s standing inside Lebanon has been compromised by the allegations. Since its inception, the group has depicted itself as caring for the welfare of all Lebanese, not just Shiites. But now the tribunal is producing overwhelming, albeit circumstantial, evidence that Hezbollah murdered the most important politician Lebanon had ever produced, and indiscriminately slaughtered many others in the process.
Nasrallah, the group’s leader, seems to have grasped this problem, because after the indictments were issued he immediately began fighting the tribunal with all his might. Since Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006, Nasrallah almost never leaves his bunker in South Beirut, for fear of Israeli assassins and drones, and he makes no public appearances. On July 2, a few days after the first four suspects’ names were released, Nasrallah emerged to deliver a long speech, broadcast by his TV station, Al Manar. “The four men have been unjustly accused,” Nasrallah said. He confirmed that the defendants were indeed members of his organization, men “who have an honorable history in resisting the Israeli occupation,” and he threatened to “cut off the hand” of anyone trying to capture them. The whole tribunal, he said, was an “American-Israeli conspiracy” and full of “financial and moral corruption.” It was invalid, he said: “We reject it, and reject the invalid accusations and invalid rulings to be issued by it, and consider them an aggression against us and against our resistance fighters, and an injustice against the honor of this nation.” A Hezbollah delegate to Parliament demanded an end to Lebanon’s contribution to the cost of the tribunal in a no less menacing tone: “Otherwise the matter will be very dangerous.”
The lawyers for the defendants are more circumspect, focusing instead on the very real problem of defending clients in absentia in a case that is entirely circumstantial. “This is a moot court, like a fictional case,” said Philippe Larochelle, another member of the defense team. “We don’t have access to our clients and can’t raise an alibi. All we can do is deconstruct the prosecutor’s theory” — a theory, he said, that is based on unproved investigative techniques, including “co-location” and “link analysis.”
The tribunal has pursued its lofty goals imperfectly, and yet as I come to the end of my work on this article, after a full year of research, interviews in seven countries and the study of thousands of pages of evidence and court protocols, my reflections are dominated by thoughts about the victims, in particular Ahmad Abu Adass. He was 22 in 2005, a naïve, kindhearted young man who only wanted to help someone he thought was a friend to learn to pray. Instead, or so the evidence suggests, he fell victim to an unspeakable trap — forced to make a suicide bomber’s tape and then thrown into some pit, without a name, without a monument.
Ronen Bergman is a senior political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and a contributing writer for the magazine. He is writing a history of the Mossad.
A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2015, on page MM35 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Hezbollah Connection. Today’s Paper|Subscribe
