STL prosecutor hides evidence: Lebanese ex-general

Ex-general Jamil Sayyed accused the Special Tribunal for Lebanon's prosecutor Friday of hiding proof that he was wrongly detained for four years for the 2005 murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri.
"The evidence of these offences has been concealed for the last five years by the prosecutor", Sayyed's lawyer Akram Azoury told a judge in The Hague, claiming that false witnesses caused his client's detention without charge from August 2005 to April 2009.
This concealment may result in "universal impunity of the perpetrators", Azoury told a hearing before pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen into a bid by Sayyed to gain access to his docket, held by the prosecutor.
Sayyed wants the documents to initiate national court proceedings against those responsible for the "libellous contentions" that saw him jailed.
The former general warned that the tribunal might not "be able to bear the consequences" of what he called prosecutor Daniel Bellemare's "footdragging" and "delaying tactics" in providing the material.
"Those who doubt the tribunal and think it is politicised are those who can see this mountain of false witnesses Mr Bellemare does not want to see," he told Fransen.
"I am one of these people, I can see this mountain of false witnesses. The issue of the false witnesses has become a problem for the entire Lebanese society."
After the hearing, Sayyed told AFP that accountability and openness were essential to "prevent what happened under the investigating commission also happening before the tribunal", referring to the false testimony.
"This is not a question simply of false witnesses. The conspiracy of the false witnesses brought Lebanon to the brink of civil war, it destroyed relations between communities, it destroyed Lebanon's external relations with Syria. Inter-Arab relations were also affected."
Sayyed, a former security services director, is one of four generals who claim they were arbitrarily detained following the deaths of Hariri and 22 others in a car bomb blast on February 14, 2005.
Together with the Shiite Hezbollah and its allies, he has accused security officials, politicians and judges close to the former premier's son, Prime Minister Saad Hariri, of having "manufactured" evidence.
A Lebanese judge ordered the general placed in temporary detention in August 2005 on an arrest warrant issued at the request of an international, UN-created commission of inquiry, also led by Bellemare, into Hariri's murder.
But in April 2009, the UN tribunal ordered the release of Sayyed and three others, saying there was not sufficient evidence to keep them.
Ekkehard Withopf, for the office of the prosecutor, told the court that Sayyed "has no right to access the office of the prosecutor's evidential holdings".
Jeopardising confidentiality may put the ongoing investigation at risk and threaten the well-being of witnesses, he said.
"The prosecution fears that the applicant will make public use of the material if he gets access to it."