BEIRUT: One of two people authorized to handle assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s custom radio jamming equipment testified at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Friday, insisting that the electronic system had been functioning properly when the Lebanese leader’s motorcade was blown up.
The functionality of the jammers, intended to block remote-controlled bombs, has emerged as a crucial detail as the defense teams seek to poke holes in the prosecution’s assertion that a suicide bomber was responsible for the attack. The defense claims that an underground bomb, detonated remotely, could have killed Hariri and 21 others on Feb. 14, 2005.
Ali Diab, the electronics expert who testified Friday, explained that Hariri had a special jamming system installed in his Mercedes vehicles that was “not bought from the commercial market place [and] was specifically designed.”
The jamming system covered a wider range of radio frequencies than those available on the open market.
Including Diab, just four people knew the precise specifications of the jammers: Saad Hariri, Yehia al-Arab and an individual identified in the court as “PRH507.” Arab was both Diab’s uncle and head of Hariri’s personal security. He died alongside the former premier in the 2005 attack.
The unidentified electronics expert known as PRH507 testified before the tribunal in October, but was granted protection measures to prevent his identity from being revealed. He traveled to Beirut several times each year to ensure that the equipment was functioning correctly.
Diab testified that he had checked the jamming system on Feb. 12, 2005, just two days before the assassination, and it was in perfect working order.
Defense lawyer Iain Edwards, who represents top Hezbollah operative Mustafa Badreddine, has previously suggested that “catastrophic failures of the jammer system” may have occurred.
Diab repeatedly rebuffed such a possibility, however, in his testimony Friday. He said that it was extremely unlikely for the jammers to fail as he personally checked the system three or four times each week.
In the 12 years that he worked on the jammers, Diab said that he had received concerns “once or twice” about their functionality. There had not been an issue with the jammers, Diab testified, since before the year 2000, and the system was regularly updated and enhanced. The system had been most recently updated in January 2005, the month before the assassination. Diab said.
Throughout his cross-examination, Edwards raised questions to suggest that the jamming system had been tampered with at the time of the attack. The court was shown images taken from footage of the wreckage showing what remained of one of the jamming systems.
Diab was adamant, however, that the jamming systems were in working order, and that the explosives could only have been detonated by “a wire or a suicide bomber.”
Diab, who was at Hariri’s Qoreitem Palace at the time of the attack, said that the jamming device was taken away as evidence soon after the explosion and he did not see it again in person until an investigation commission called him to inspect it.
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