Lebanon’s outgoing Prime Minister Hassan Diab and three former ministers have been charged with negligence that led to the deaths of hundreds and injuries to thousands in the massive August Beirut port explosion.
Fadi Sawan, the judge investigating the blast, on Thursday charged Diab, former public works ministers Ghazi Zaeiter and Youssef Fenianos and former finance minister Ali Hassan Khalil, with criminal negligence, a senior judicial source told Al Jazeera. The charges were later confirmed by state media.
Sawan said he would seek to question Diab as a defendant in the case on Monday at the Grand Serail, the seat of government in Beirut. He has also called in the former three ministers for questioning on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, also as defendants.
Sawan had previously questioned them only as “witnesses”.
But Diab’s office indicated the prime minister would not comply with Sawan’s investigation, saying in a statement that Sawan had violated the constitution by overstepping the role of the Parliament of Lebanon, which has a specialised court for the trial of top officials.
The prime minister’s “conscience is clear” and he had dealt with the explosion issue in a “responsible and transparent” manner, the statement said.
“This surprising targeting goes beyond the person to the position per se, and Hassan Diab will not allow the premiership to be targeted by any party,” the statement said.
Sawan’s decision comes two weeks after he sent a letter to Lebanon’s Parliament in which he noted “serious suspicions related to some government officials,” and their involvement in the explosion, according to a statement released on Thursday by a council of senior judges who appointed Sawan to probe the case.
Instead of initiating investigations at the specialised parliamentary court, Parliament’s office, under the control of Speaker Nabih Berri, replied two days later that it had “no suspicions” over the involvement of top officials in the blast based on the evidence Sawan presented in his letter.
The source told that Sawan had tried to get Parliament “to explore the political responsibility of ministers, but they declined to move forward. This pushed him to file these charges of negligence, which he considers within his jurisdiction”.
The decision to prosecute the outgoing prime minister and former ministers is based on verified written correspondence sent to them, warning the officials about nearly 3,000 tonnes of explosive material at Beirut’s port, the source said.
Kayan Tlais, a spokesperson for a committee of the families of victims, told that he had full confidence in the judiciary’s ability to prosecute the case and would leave it up to Sawan to determine who was ultimately responsible.
“We don’t want to pre-empt the trial or comment on who should be charged or not – that’s the expertise of the judiciary, not ours,” said Tlais, whose 39-year-old brother Mohammad, a foreman at the port’s container terminal, died in the explosion.
The latest charges raise the number of people being prosecuted over the blast to 37, some 25 of whom are in detention.
Source : Agencies
