The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  CHAPTER 24

  THE BEIRUT ASSASSINATION

  The crime occurred at 12:56 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, 2005. Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was blown up, along with most of his armored convoy, in front of the Hotel St. George in Beirut. The bomb had been packed into a white Mitsubishi van that had been moved into position by a suicide driver one minute and fifty seconds earlier; the powerful explosion tore a seven-foot deep crater into the street and killed twenty-three people.

  The assassination caused an international uproar, and the Lebanese government turned to the United Nations for help. The U.N. Security Council appointed Detlev Mehlis, a German judge renowned for his solvings of terrorist bombings, to head its investigation. Early in the U.N. investigation, clues seemed to point to a jihadist suicide bomber. Various Islamist terrorists had used similar Mitsubishi vans in a spate of other Beirut bombings. Elements in the bomb were traced back to military explosives used by al-Qaeda of Iraq. A convenient videotape sent to Al Jazeera television showed a lone suicide bomber named Abu Addas claiming that he acted on behalf of an unknown jihadist group. But the lone-assassin theory did not last long.

  The U.N. investigative team, which included forensic experts in explosives, DNA, and telecommunications from ten countries, found convincing evidence that the assassination was a cleverly disguised, state-sponsored operation. The Mitsubishi van had been stolen in Japan, shipped via the port of Dubai to the Syrian-controlled Bekka Valley, where it was modified to carry the bomb, and then, only days before the assassination, driven over a military-controlled highway to Beirut.

  One participant in the planning of the attack was Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, a Syrian intelligence operative. Saddik told investigators that the putative bomber, Abu Addas, was a mere decoy who had been induced to go to Syria and make the bogus video and was then killed. He further alleged that the actual van driver had been recruited in Iraq under false pretenses, presumably so that if he defected or was captured, he would wrongly identify his recruiters as jihadists. Saddik said that the “special explosives” in the TNT had been intentionally planted there to mislead investigators in the direction of Iraq. Saddik was arrested for his role in the crime in 2005 and was released without reason the following year. He vanished in March 2008 from a Paris suburb.

  Meanwhile, the U.N. team uncovered evidence that the actual conspirators had resources and capabilities—including wiretaps of Hariri’s phones—that pointed to a state-level intelligence service. U.N. telecommunications analysts determined that eight new telephone numbers and ten mobile telephones had been used, along with the wiretapping, to follow Hariri’s movements with split-second precision and move the van into place.

  In addition, a former Syrian intelligence agent told investigators that he had driven a Syrian military officer on a reconnaissance mission past the Hotel St. George on the day before the bombing, and that the officer had told him that four Lebanese generals, in collaboration with General Rustam Ghazali, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, had provided “money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, and ID cards” to the alleged assassination team.

  Judge Mehlis’ report, issued in October 2005, concluded that “there is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials, and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services.” Judge Mehlis had the four Lebanese generals arrested in 2005.

  When the judge moved to question Syrian officials—including the intelligence chief, Assef Shawkat, who is Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in law—the Syrians stonewalled and protested the inquest’s direction. In January 2006, the U.N. Security Council replaced Judge Mehlis with Serge Brammertz, a forty-three-year-old Belgian lawyer who had served as deputy prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

  Brammertz was replaced in 2008 by Daniel Bellemare, Canada’s assistant deputy attorney general. In April 2009, Bellemare requested that the four imprisoned Lebanese generals be released because of the “complete absence of reliable proof against them.” And so they were.

  Meanwhile, Lebanese investigators working on behalf of the U.N. team had re-examined cell phone records from 2005. They uncovered a network of about twenty mobile phones that had all been activated a few weeks before the attack and then silenced just afterward. This so-called second ring of phones had been calling the same phone numbers that had been called by the eight phones that coordinated the attack.

  By 2009, investigators had traced the second ring of phones to a command post of Hezbollah’s military wing under the notorious Imad Mughniyeh, who had been responsible, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, for other spectacular bombing attacks, including the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut. But before this cell-phone evidence could be further examined, the Lebanese chief investigator working on this complex network was killed in Beirut in 2009. (Mughniyeh, who might otherwise have been called as a witness, had himself been assassinated in 2008.)

  In April 2010, U.N. investigators summoned twelve Hezbollah members and supporters for questioning. This spurred rumors that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which the U.N. set up in March 2008, was on the verge of finally issuing indictments. The political reaction in Lebanon showed the potential costs of pursuing a political crime. Hezbollah’s powerful chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said ominously in July 2010 that Hezbollah would not stand by idly if its members were accused of involvement in the assassination. He also denounced what he called attempts to “politicize” the tribunal—as if political consideration could be omitted from political crime.

  Nasrallah also moved to discredit the U.N. by saying that its investigators come from “intelligence services closely linked to the Israeli Mossad.” He demanded the establishment of a Lebanese committee to investigate “false witnesses.” In September 2010 he went further, claiming that Hezbollah had “evidence” that Israel was behind the assassination. Syria, for its part, is claiming to be the victim of planted evidence.

  When the Special Tribunal for Lebanon then indicated four members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese government chose to ignore the indictments and terminate its support for the tribunal. The tribunal, which relocated to the suburb of Leidschendam just outside The Hague, then announced that it would try the four members of Hezbollah in absentia. It issued warrants for their arrest, but the Lebanese government refused to act on them. Instead, it declared the tribunal to be illegitimate, leaving the crime officially unsolved.

  Three theories have been advanced to fill the judicial vacuum. First, there is the view that the assassination was the work of Syrian intelligence units based in Lebanon. In December 2005, former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam, after resigning from the government, said that he heard Syrian President Assad personally threaten Hariri before the assassination, and that Assad had the means to carry out the plot. Second, according to the U.N. tribunal, the assassination was carried out by Hezbollah, which bought the stolen Japanese van, armed it with the TNT and C4 explosives used in the attack, and killed Hariri. Finally, there is the theory proposed by Hezbollah that Israel’s Mossad was behind the attack. In support of this view, it is claimed that the jamming devices for blocking remote-control bombs in Hariri’s convoy were manufactured by Israel and that these devices were disabled before the attack. The U.N. investigation, however, found no evidence that any of the three anti-jamming devices had been disabled.

  My assessment is that this political assassination was most likely organized by the military wing of Hezbollah, which then ghosted a trail to Syria to cover its tracks. The inability of the government to act on the evidence provided by the U.N. tribunal, or even serve the indictments on those charged, demonstrates again how difficult it is to resolve a crime when vital political interests are at stake.

  CHAPTER 25

  WHO ASSASSINAT
ED

  ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA?

  The brutal murder of Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006 sent shock waves through the media community not only in Russia but around the world. The award-winning Russian journalist was gunned down at close range at about 4:00 p.m on October 7 in the stairwell of her apartment block. Three bullets hit her body, and a fourth bullet was fired into her head, execution-style. Next to her body, there were a Makarov PM pistol, a silencer, and the four shell casings from the bullets. As the Makarov PM ordinarily ejects its shells about ten to fifteen feet behind the shooter, the killer had collected the casings and neatly placed them next to his victim, which police interpreted as the signature of a contract killer. The killer, whose features were obscured from CCTV cameras by a baseball cap, knew the code to access Politkovskaya’s building. It was also determined from the cameras that he had entered the building just before Politkovskaya had returned from shopping.

  The plot grew more sinister after police investigators examined the videotapes from other surveillance cameras. Politkovskaya’s last stop before returning home was the nearby Ramstor shopping center. Here the investigators established that she had been under surveillance by a man in jeans and a woman in black. The CCTV cameras revealed that they had methodically followed her as she shopped. As they examined CCTV video from other locations she had visited early that week, they found that she had also been tailed by these and other trackers. Such surveillance technique suggested that she was being watched by a security service.

  Identifying Politkovskaya’s trackers turned out to be relatively easy for the police.

  According to the chief investigator in the case, the trackers had been linked to other plotters by their cell-phone records, saying, “they called back and forth by phone before the murder, on the day of the murder, and after it.” The problem confronting the police was where these tracks led. Some of those identified were current or former agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Indeed, it was such a sensitive issue that it took nearly ten months before the police got Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, to issue warrants to arrest the suspects. In a press conference on August 27, 2007, after announcing that ten suspects in Politkovskaya’s murder had been arrested, Chaika ominously warned, “Unfortunately, this group included retired and acting Ministry of the Interior and FSB officers.” The official version was that Politkovskaya had been killed for money by a Chechen criminal gang in Moscow that had paid a lieutenant colonel in the FSB to provide surveillance on her.

  The shooter was subsequently identified by authorities as Rustam Makhmudov, a Chechen allegedly employed as a contract killer. He was apparently warned about his imminent arrest and provided with a forged passport, which allowed him to flee Russia. The best that the police could do was to arrest two of his brothers, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, as accomplices. They also arrested FSB Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov, who was charged with abuse of office and extortion in connection with the assassination.

  On February 19, 2009, after a three-month trial, a jury unanimously acquitted the accused. Since Russia does not proscribe double jeopardy, prosecutors filed a motion to retry the case, which was approved in August 2009. Two years later, they charged Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, a former police lieutenant colonel, with organizing the plot. He then implicated Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former Ministry of the Interior official, who denied the charge. The trial of Pavlyuchenkov in December 2012 was held behind closed doors after the judge ruled that all testimony needed to be kept secret. According to Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow-based newspaper for which Politkovskaya reported, Pavlyuchenkov claimed in his pretrial testimony that Politkovskaya’s murder was ordered by two London-based enemies of Putin, billionaire Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev, an organizer of the Chechen revolt (which coincides with Putin’s theory that the murder was staged as a provocation). Consequently, on December 13, 2012, Pavlyuchenkov was found guilty as an accomplice and sentenced to eleven years imprisonment. None of the testimony in this trial will be made public. (One reason such political crimes remain difficult to resolve in Russia is that potentially embarrassing testimony can be kept secret.) Even if there is a further trial of the perpetrators, which is by no means certain, it will not resolve the real mystery: Who really gave the orders and paid to have Politkovskaya assassinated on Putin’s birthday?

  The theory of the prosecution is that the contract to assassinate Politkovskaya ultimately came from the leaders of the Russian-backed regime in Chechnya. She had been exposing their illegal activities, and they hired the killers. A second theory is that Putin’s enemies abroad paid the killers to execute this world-famous journalist on Putin’s birthday to undermine Putin. Finally, there is the theory that Putin himself ordered the hit to intimidate journalists.

  The problem in a political crime in which elements of the government, security services, and organized crime rings collaborate is that while it is possible to arrest the thugs who carried out the contract, the link to those who issued the contract may disappear. What is clear to me is that the murder involved killers for hire, officers in the FSB, and political leaders in Chechnya. My assessment of the case based on interviews in Moscow is that there had to be police involvement that went beyond that of Lieutenant Colonel Pavliuchenkov. The surveillance of Politkovskaya, which was carried out by Pavliuchenkov’s unit, involved, according to the released investigative report, “two shifts: the first one from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., the second one—from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. Each shift included no less than two transportation units, and at least six operatives.” Such a massive operation, even if it is part of a contract killing, suggests a great deal of money and power behind the murder. It is plausible that the contract was given by those leaders in Chechnya who were the targets of Politkovskaya’s investigative reporting. But Moscow’s contract-killings are not always explained by plausible motives. One Russian official I interviewed quoted the famous closing line of the movie Chinatown, “Forget it Jake. This is Chinatown,” to make the point that American investigative logic does not apply to Russian mysteries.

  CHAPTER 26

  BLOWING UP BHUTTO

  On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto was killed by a suicide bomber in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Twenty-four other people were also killed in the explosion. Bhutto had just returned from a nine-year exile as part of a deal arranged by the United States. The plan, if it succeeded, would bring about an American-sponsored regime change: Bhutto would run in a nationwide election, win, and replace the faltering military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf.

  That afternoon Bhutto spoke at a massive political rally at Liaquat Park, a park named after Pakistan’s founding Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who, in 1951, was assassinated. Bhutto departed at 5:00 p.m. in a white armored Land Cruiser. As the convoy made a right turn onto the main highway, Bhutto was waving to her supporters through the roof hatch in her car. Then a gunman standing a few feet behind her car fired three shots and also detonated a bomb. The video footage shows that only 1.6 seconds elapsed between the time of the first shot and the detonation of the explosives. Bhutto received a large head wound, and she died in the hospital less than an hour later. Her doctors, finding no bullet wounds, postulated that she died from a head injury caused by the explosion. Since authorities did not permit an autopsy to be conducted, even though it is required by law, the cause of her death was not conclusively determined. Access to the crime-scene investigation was also inexplicably limited by authorities.

  Only one bullet casing was recovered, which was traced by the DNA on it to skull fragments of the suspected gunman. The skull fragment, which was found on the roof of a nearby building, was determined to have come from a boy no more than sixteen years old. Since the crime scene itself was hosed down within an hour of the shooting, other potential clues, including any other DNA evidence, were washed away. (The lone bullet casing was found lodged in a sewer drain.) Similarly, Bhutto’s L
and Rover had been scrubbed clean hours after the blast. The extraordinary cleansing of the crime scene before all the evidence could be recovered had been ordered by police authorities. According to the UN commission that investigated the assassination, “Hosing down the crime scene so soon after the blast goes beyond mere incompetence,” and raises the issue of “whether this amounts to criminal irresponsibility.” As a result, it was all but impossible to determine whether the bomber had any accomplices.

  Despite the lack of forensic evidence, at a press conference arranged by General Musharraf the very next day, it was announced that Bhutto’s assassination had been organized by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan, assisted by al-Qaeda. The government spokesman said that the Pakistan intelligence service had intercepted a message in which Mehsud congratulated a subordinate on the Bhutto assassination. Fugitive warrants were then issued for Mehsud (who was killed in 2009 by a CIA drone attack) and his subordinates. Meanwhile, the UN investigators obtained a transcript of the intercepted message, but it contained no mention of either Mehsud or the Bhutto assassination. Instead, it contained a conversation in which someone called “Emir Sahib” asked another unknown person merely “who were they?” After he was told three names, he said “The three did it?” When U.N. investigators attempted to pursue the matter, the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence arm, claimed that it had been able to identify “Emir Sahib” as Mehsud through a “voice signature,” and that from the context of the conversation, its analysts assumed that the “it” likely referred to the Bhutto assassination. The ISI also refused to divulge the date of the interception, the means by which it was obtained, or how it was verified. So the U.N. commission was unable to authenticate the official theory of the assassination.