Hezbollah Rejects UN Charges Over ’05 Killing

The New York Times reports:

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, vowed Saturday that four members of his group indicted by an international tribunal in the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister would never be arrested. He dismissed the charges as a conspiracy to sow sectarian strife here.

The comments, Mr. Nasrallah’s first since the indictments were issued on Thursday, appeared to cast Lebanon into familiar territory: another period of waiting as a United Nations-backed tribunal that Hezbollah dismisses as a tool of the United States and Israel prepare for the next step if the men are not arrested.

The long-awaited indictments again brought to the fore the assassination in 2005 of Rafik Hariri, a former Sunni Muslim prime minister admired by supporters for his reconstruction of Lebanon after its 15-year civil war and criticized by his detractors for corruption that has seemed to infuse most aspects of public life here.

“No Lebanese government will be able to carry out any arrests whether in 30 days, 60 days, 1 year, 2 years, 30 years or even 300 years,” said Mr. Nasrallah, whose Shiite militant group fought a fierce battle against Israel in 2006. “What will happen is a trial in absentia, a trial in which the verdict has already been reached.”