A UN-backed tribunal found a member of the Lebanese group Hezbollah guilty of killing former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 in a massive bomb blast.
Three other Hezbollah suspects were removed on Tuesday.
The ruling of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) – an international court based in The Hague, the Netherlands – came more than 15 years after Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, along with 21 others in the big explosion in the capital Beirut.
The four members of Iran-backed militia and political party Hezbollah were accused of organizing and carrying out the attack, although the group was not formally accused and denied any involvement.
The four – Salim Ayyash, Assad Sabra, Hassan Oneissi and Hassan Habib Merhi – were tried in absentia because Hezbollah refused to disclose their whereabouts.
Ayyash used a mobile phone identified by prosecutors as critical in the attack, a judge said.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is “satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt” the evidence that Ayyash used the phone, Judge Micheline Braidy said, reading a summary of the 2,600-page ruling.
However, prosecutors did not provide enough evidence to prove that the three others were accomplices, Judge Janet Nosworthy said.
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‘Designed to scare’
Chairman of Judge David Re said the evidence was largely based on mobile phone network data with the suspects accused of following Hariri’s movements in the months leading up to the attack, and the phones’ dark ‘are after the explosion.
Judge Janet Nosworthy four different networks of mobile phones “were interconnected and coordinated, and functioned as secret networks at the relevant times”.
The court found that the killing was politically motivated in an “act of terrorism designed to intimidate the Lebanese people”.
“The tribunal has found beyond a reasonable doubt that a suicide bomber triggered the explosion,” Re said as he read the verdict.
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The assassination plunged Lebanon into what was then the worst crisis since the 1975-90 civil war, setting the stage for years of confrontation between rival political factions.
Syrian troops, who had been in Lebanon for more than 40 years, were forced to flee the country because many Lebanese Damascus were blamed for the killings.
The government of Bashar al-Assad has denied any involvement.
The tribunal dismissed both the leadership of Hezbollah and Syria on the grounds of lack of evidence.
“The trial chamber is of the opinion that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr Hariri and some of his political allies,” Re said.
“However, there was no evidence that Hezbollah’s leadership had any involvement in the assassination of Mr Hariri, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”
Hezbollah has described the tribunal as a conspiracy against the movement. Its leader Hassan Nasrallah defended the innocence of the suspects last week.
‘Go to the lead’
Toby Cadman, an international human rights lawyer, said the tribunal did not shed new light on the murder, but was noted for being the first trial of its kind to rely entirely on “cell analysis” as evidence.
He noted after all the time and money spent, only moderate to low level perpetrators were convicted in the murder.
“If you go back to the beginning of the trial, there was a reference to the Syrian regime in the opening speech of the prosecutor, so there was an attempt to implicate the Assad regime and to the “Unfortunately, whether there is a lack of independent evidence to produce such a link is everyone’s guess,” Cadman told Al Jazeera.
“From an outside perspective, there would have been more satisfaction after spending close to $ 1 billion that it would go to those who actually ordered it.”
Initially, five suspects were identified – all Hezbollah members. Charges against one of the group’s top military commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, were dropped after he was assassinated in 2016 in Syria.
Ayyash’s sentence will be issued at a later date. The UN-backed court does not impose the death penalty and maximum prison sentences are life imprisonment.
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