Trial Opens Into Killing of Lebanese Prime Minister

LONDON - Almost nine years after Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, was killed by a truck bomb, an international tribunal opened hearings into the case on Thursday in a courtroom in the Netherlands with lawyers and judges clustered around a mock-up of the crime scene on the Beirut waterfront.

But notably absent from the Special Tribunal on Lebanon, in a former spy agency office on the outskirts of The Hague, were the four accused who have been shielded from arrest and prosecution by the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah.

The trial of Assad Hassan Sabra, Salim Jamil Ayyash, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Mustafa Amine Badreddine represents the first time that an international tribunal has tried defendants in their absence since the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Even if they are convicted, the four are entitled to a new trial if they are apprehended.

The tribunal has spent about $325 million in preparation for the hearings into the attack that killed Mr. Hariri and 22 others on Feb. 14, 2005.

But the trial opened under inauspicious circumstances. Even as the case began, a car bomb exploded in a northeastern Lebanese town close to the Syrian border, killing three people - the latest in a series of apparently sectarian attacks. The trial itself has come to be seen as a new fault line in the region's confrontations as the bloodletting of Syria's civil war spills into Lebanon.

The prosecution said on Thursday that Mr. Hariri had been traveling in a convoy of six vehicles and was in an armor-plated Mercedes. Some of the cars were fitted with jamming devices to prevent the triggering of explosives by mobile phone signals.

The court was shown CCTV images of a white van moving across Beirut as the convoy set off toward the St. Georges Hotel building on the seafront.

The van is seen moving slowly past the building as the convoy drives toward it. Then the prosecution showed a photograph of the scene of the blast and the huge crater it created.

'The attackers used an extraordinary amount of high explosives, far more than necessary,' the prosecution said. 'It is not that the perpetrators did not care if they killed their fellow citizens. They intended to do so.'

The suicide bomber was 'blown into tiny pieces' by the blast, the prosecution added.

The attack took place between the St. Georges Hotel and the adjacent Byblos building, in 'a man-made canyon' that concentrated the force of the blast, the prosecution said. The result was a 'man-made hell.'