The media in the coming week will undoubtedly focus on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in The Hague, in light of the testimony of Lebanese political figures as witnesses, and more importantly the insinuation of a link between the defendant’s cellphone lines and senior Syrian officials, whose names, according to Lebanese Interior Minister Nohad Mashnouk, may include Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The lawyers of the five defendants who are being prosecuted by the international tribunal in absentia — after the Lebanese and international authorities failed to find them and bring them before the special tribunal, which was established under UN Security Council Resolution 1757 on May 30, 2007 — anticipate a correlation between the expected testimonies and the cellphone line links.

On Nov. 17, the first high-level politician who appeared before the judges as a witness — and is expected to be questioned for at least the next seven days — is Marwan Hamadeh, Lebanon’s former minister and current member of parliament. Hamadeh was a friend of late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He was also subject to an assassination attempt when a car bomb exploded as his car was passing by in Beirut on Oct. 1, 2004. He miraculously survived the assassination attempt that took place four months and 13 days before Hariri’s assassination on Feb. 14, 2005.

Hamadeh’s testimony is expected to focus on the political atmosphere that prevailed during that period and the tense or hostile climate that had ruled the relationship between Hariri on the one hand, and Lebanese or Syrian parties on the other. It's also expected that the prosecution will ask Hamadeh to explain his testimony, which was included in the report issued on Oct. 20, 2005, by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who headed the UN inquiry into Hariri's assassination. Mehlis quoted Hamadeh as saying that Hariri received a direct threat from Assad during their last meeting on Aug. 26, 2004, in Damascus. Hamadeh told the international investigator: “The day Mr. Hariri met with President Assad, I was meeting at Mr. [Walid] Jumblatt’s residence in Beirut, with Bassem Sabaa and Ghazi Aridi. We saw that Mr. Hariri’s motorcade was back by 1 p.m., which meant that the meeting in Damascus was pretty short. We saw Mr. Hariri who looked tired. He was sweating. He told the four of us that President [Emile] Lahoud was to be re-elected or ‘he will have to pay a high price’. … He reported President Assad saying to him, ‘I will break Lebanon on your and Jumblatt’s heads.'”