Siniora: Hariri ‘reduced to tears’ by Assad comments

Lebanon’s former prime minister, Fouad Siniora, testified before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon on Monday recalling how the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri “sobbed” when he recalled a disastrous meeting with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in 2003.

Standing outside the Grand Serail in January 2004, Hariri is said to have leaned on Siniora’s shoulder and began to shed tears.

“[Hariri] told me: ‘I will never forget so long as I live the humiliation and the insults directed to me by President Bashar Assad in the presence of his three officers’,” Siniora told the STL on the first day of his testimony.

Siniora said the Syrian regime “has often resorted to threats, verbal abuse and intimidation with Lebanese officials and politicians”.