BEIRUT—A U.N. report on the killing of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri said new leads had been uncovered on who carried out the attack but did not say who ordered it, according to a copy obtained by Reuters on Monday.
The latest report of the commission led by Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz, delivered on Monday to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said Syria had been generally cooperative in the investigation into the bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others in Beirut in February 2005.
"The commission has identified a considerable number of new leads for investigation relating to the crime scene, its vicinity and the immediate perpetration of the crime, and has begun investigative and analytical work on each one them," said the report given to Reuters by a Lebanese political source.
A report last year by Brammertz's predecessor Detlev Mehlis implicated senior Syrian security officials in Hariri's killing and said Syria was impeding the inquiry.
But Brammertz's latest report was mainly technical and did not offer conclusions on who ordered the killing.
As in earlier reports, the latest update on the investigation said Hariri had probably been killed by a truck bomb detonated by a suicide attacker. Some earlier theories had suggested explosives could have been planted underground.
Monday's report said new tests corroborated the theory that the explosives had been in a van containing "a very large bomb of a minimum of 1,200 kg TNT equivalent and most likely detonated by a man...within or immediately in front of the van".
The United Nations Security Council is due to discuss the report on Friday.
"The cooperation that the commission has received from the Syrian Arab Republic has remained generally satisfactory," the report said.
Many Lebanese Blame Syria
Hariri had become a critic of Syria's decades-long domination of Lebanon shortly before his death, and the attack took place after he accused Syria of meddling in internal Lebanese politics. Mass street protests followed and Lebanese opposition politicians blamed Damascus for his death.
Syria, which dominated Lebanon for three decades, denied any involvement in the killing but agreed shortly afterward to withdraw its troops from Lebanon under international pressure.
The Security Council ordered an outside inquiry into the killing in December 2005 after a U.N. fact-finding mission concluded a Lebanese investigation would lack credibility.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Vice President Farouq al-Shara were interviewed on April 25 in Damascus for the inquiry.
"The commission continues to conduct a number of interviews and re-interviews of representatives or former representatives of the Syrian and Lebanese government structures. This work will remain ongoing throughout the next reporting period," Monday's report said.
It said Hariri was probably aware of a heightened threat against him in the weeks before his killing.
"There is evidence to believe that Hariri was aware of a heightened threat against him... and had factored the unusually elevated threat environment into his thinking, approach, activities and movements over the last few weeks of his life," it said.
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