Mehlis report

The Mehlis Report is the result of the United Nations' investigation into the 14 February 2005 assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. The investigation was launched in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1595 and headed by the German judge, Detlev Mehlis. It involved questioning of Lebanese and Syrian officials.

This report was preceded by, and should not be confused with, the UN's FitzGerald Report.

The final draft of the Mehlis Report was released on 20 October 2005, and found that high-ranking members of the Syrian and Lebanese governments were involved in the assassination. The report based its findings on key witnesses and on a variety of evidence including patterns of telephone calls between specific prepaid phone cards that connected prominent Lebanese and Syrian officials to events surrounding the crime.

Upon release of the first report, the term of the investigation was extended to 15 December 2005; a second report with further findings was released on 10 December 2005.

On 15 December, the Security Council voted unanimously to extend the investigation again to 15 June 2006. On 15 December, Detlev Mehlis stepped down as chief investigator to return to Berlin. On 11 January 2006, Mehlis was replaced by Serge Brammertz.

The official Mehlis Report made no specific mention of anyone in the Syrian government as responsible for the assassination. However, the report was first erroneously released as a Microsoft Word document which preserved changes that had been made in the document since its creation. According to that document, the original U.N. report had specifically named many high-ranking Syrian government and military officials by name as being personally responsible for the death of Rafik Hariri.

For example, a previous editing of the report stated that "Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamil Al Sayyed" were behind the killing of Hariri. But in the official version, this is replaced by "senior Lebanese and Syrian officials". Maher al-Assad is the brother of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Assef Shawqat, a powerful figure within the government, was married to their sister Bushra. Suleyman is a top Syrian security official and Al Sayyed, the only Lebanese of the four, was the head of Lebanon's General Security Department at the time of Hariri's assassination.

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