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A Bomb in Beirut

Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Hassan Na’srallah, has accused Israel of fabricating a report in the German news weekly Der Spiegel revealing that the U.N.-backed investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri had discovered evidence linking the murder directly to Hizbullah. "The report in Der Spiegel is very, very, very dangerous," Na’srallah said in a speech transmitted from his hiding-place via video link to supporters rallying in southern Beirut on Monday. Na’srallah has not been seen in public except on video for months. "I consider the report in Der Spiegel an Israeli accusation,” he said, charging the authors of the report with “an agenda to stir strife” between the Sunni and Shi’a community in Lebanon. He warned that Israel was preparing to attack Lebanon again, as it did in 2006. The Der Spiegel report set off a political firestorm in Lebanon ahead of the country’s general election on June 7. According to the German magazine, the massive Valentine’s Day bomb that killed Hariri and 22 other people, leaving a crater two meters deep in front of the Hotel St. Georges in Beirut, was planted by “special forces of the Lebanese Shi’ite organization Hizbullah (Party of God).” The report said a Lebanese intelligence unit had identified eight mobile phones all bought on the same day in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli that were used in the proximity of the attack, and another 20 in close contact with them, that were “apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack… all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the ‘operational arm’ of Hizbullah.” Na’srallah said the accusations were part of an “American-Israeli scheme” aimed at "creating an Arab-Iranian conflict and a Sunni-Shi’a conflict." In Syria, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem dismissed the report as "trash." Perhaps he preferred the findings of the previous investigation that held Syrian intelligence responsible for the crime.