Belén Fernández: Days into the start of the trial last month, defense lawyer Antoine Korkmaz lambasted the prosecution for selecting two Argentine experts to confirm a desired conclusion: that the explosion that killed Hariri was the work of a suicide bomber with a Mitsubishi van and not, as the defense argues, the result of an underground bomb. According to Korkmaz, the expertise of these two individuals had also been called upon in the aftermath of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, which killed over eighty people. […] As [Gareth] Porter documents, the allegation that the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA in a white Renault Trafic van found little substantiation in reality. For one thing, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms produced an on-scene post-explosion report “suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside” the AMIA building. For another, only one out of approximately two hundred eyewitnesses claimed to recall a white Renault Trafic. In the case of the Hariri assassination, meanwhile, the prosecution’s narrative has presumably been aided by the nighttime removal from the crime scene of vehicular evidence, the revelation of which sparked accusations of tampering and concealment. More here.