BEIRUT: U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned Friday of rising political tensions in Lebanon over the international court probing the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, after the court’s prosecutor submitted an updated indictment in the case.
In the report to the United Nations Security Council, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said the increased tension in Lebanon was “fueled among other things by speculation and public pronouncements concerning the proceeding of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon,” a U.N. spokesman said.

Ban’s statement came after the tribunal’s prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, filed an amended indictment in the case. Bellemare cited further evidence in the Hariri probe as prompting the decision.
The Netherlands-based STL, established in 2007 to investigate the assassination of Hariri, has been at the heart of political tension between Lebanon’s rival March 8 and March 14 camps.

The indictment, which remains confidential pending review by the pre-trial judge, is widely expected to implicate some Hezbollah members in the assassination, raising fears of sectarian strife.
In a statement Friday, Bellemare said an indictment that had been filed on March 11 was replaced in order to “include substantive new elements unavailable until recently.”
A prosecutor spokeswoman declined to comment on what those elements were.
“The amendment of an indictment or the filing of new indictments is and will continue to be guided solely by the evidence uncovered by the ongoing investigation,” the prosecutor said in the statement.
Hariri was killed by a huge truck bomb, triggering international condemnation that forced Lebanon’s neighbor Syria to end a 29-year military presence in the country.

Tension over the STL forced the collapse of Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Cabinet in Jan 12, when 10 March 8 coalition ministers and a minister loyal to President Michel Sleiman tendered their resignations.
The resignations came after the Hezbollah-backed March 8 alliance urged Hariri to disavow the STL, halt payment of Lebanon’s share toward the financing of the STL, withdraw Lebanese judges from the tribunal, end cooperation with the STL, and prosecute the “false witnesses” linked to the U.N. probe.

Hezbollah has repeatedly accused the STL of being a U.S.-Israeli plot aimed at targeting the resistance group.
Earlier this year, the president of the STL, Italian judge Antonio Cassese, said that the review of the court’s indictment might take longer than expected, while fervently defending the U.N.-backed body against accusations of being politicized.
“Through credible, fair and unbiased action, the tribunal thus aims at contributing to reconciliation in Lebanon,” Cassese wrote in his second annual report on the STL, which reviews the work achieved during 2010-11 in the controversial court.
In his report, Cassese argued that the STL was an impartial judicial institution established to punish culprits in the Hariri assassination.