Last week’s controversial Military Court ruling that acquitted Internal Security Forces Major Suzanne al-Hajj and sentenced the hacker Elie Ghabash to a year in prison in the Ziad Itani framing case turned Saturday from being a judicial and legal issue to a "rich material" for political bickering, prompting the Public Prosecution office to intervene, and consider a possible judicial appeal in the case and a retrial.
Asharq Al-Awsat learned on Saturday that state prosecutor of the Military Court of Cassation Ghassan Khoury asked the chair of the Permanent Military Court, General Hussein Abdallah of sending him the Hajj-Ghabash file.
Abdallah responded in a letter saying the case was referred to Government commissioner to the military, judge Peter Germanos.
Therefore, Khoury requested from Germanos to hand him the file for a possible judicial appeal in the case before the Supreme Court. The State Prosecutor is expected to receive a response in this regard on Monday.
Last Thursday, Germanos requested the cessation of legal pursuit against Hajj for the absence of incriminated evidence.
In March, Lebanon’s security and judicial investigations uncovered that Major Hajj, the former head of the Lebanese Anti-Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Bureau, played a dangerous role that overpassed hacking the pages of actor Ziad Itani, who was falsely accused of cooperating with and spying for Israel.
Itani was arrested in Beirut last November by the State Security Directorate General, on charges of collaborating and communicating with the Israeli enemy. He was then released in March 2018 after spending 109 days in detention.
Several political figures from the Mustaqbal Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Progressive Socialist Party continued to lash out Saturday at the judiciary in general and the military court in particulate for being politicized.
Hajj’s attorney, former chief of the north Bar Association, Rashid Derbas, told Asharq Al-Awsat on Saturday that the “political campaign against the court was completely unjustified and had gone out of rationality.”
However, a judicial source told Asharq Al-Awsat that Germanos had deviated from the norms during his pleading by ignoring the content of the indictment and the evidences it included.
Meanwhile, tension intensified on Saturday between the Mustaqbal Movement and the Free Patriotic Movement particularly after Mustaqbal members accused officials close to President Michel Aoun of exerting pressures on the Military Court to stop the legal pursuit against Hajj, referring to a visit conducted by Defense Minister Elias Bu Saab to this court prior to the ruling.
In a tweet posted Saturday, Future Movement Secretary-General Ahmad Hariri described the ruling as “politicized, vindictive and malicious.”
