Hizbullah plan to overthrow Lebanon - US

US: The White House has accused Lebanon's Hizbullah militia and its Iranian and Syrian backers of seeking to topple the government…

US: The White House has accused Lebanon's Hizbullah militia and its Iranian and Syrian backers of seeking to topple the government of Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said on Wednesday the United States was "increasingly concerned by mounting evidence that the Syrian and Iranian governments, Hizbullah and their Lebanese allies are preparing plans to topple Lebanon's democratically elected government".

Syria and Iran yesterday dismissed the allegations. "This pure vilification is meant to raise turmoil in  Lebanon and cause fallout with Syria, which paid with blood to maintain Lebanese independence and sovereignty," an editorial in Syria's government newspaper Baath said.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, denied the US accusation and said Washington should review its policies in the Middle East. "These are repeated claims aimed to create divisions among Lebanese people and their government," said Mr Hosseini.

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Mr Snow warned that any attempt to destabilise Lebanon through "manufactured demonstrations" or "physically threatening its leaders" would constitute clear violations ofUNresolutions. He singled out Syria, charging that it has devised a plan "to prevent" the Lebanese government from approving a UN tribunal to try the killers of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, who was assassinated in February 2005.

White House and state department spokesmen declined to characterise the evidence used to support the claim, implying that it was based on classified information. And some US intelligence officials and UN diplomats said privately that there was no sign that an armed overthrow of the government is in the works.

The announcement came just one day after Hizbullah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said in a television interview that he was prepared to organise protests if his movement was not given a larger say in his country's affairs. It followed the report of a new diplomatic initiative by British prime minister Tony Blair, who sent a senior adviser, Nigel Sheinwald, to meet Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Next week, Lebanon's leading political figures will discuss a demand by a political alliance headed by Hizbullah that it be granted 30 per cent of the Lebanese cabinet seats in a new national unity government, UN diplomats said. That would give it the power to veto any major decision by the government.

The demand represents an effort by the Islamic movement to translate into real political influence the political popularity it won by battling Israeli forces to a standstill over the summer. US and UN officials fear that Hizbullah would use that authority to block any decision by the Lebanese government to
approve a UN-backed tribunal to prosecute Hariri's suspected killers.

UN secretary general Kofi Annan convened a meeting with US, Russian, French, British and Chinese representatives to build support for a plan to establish a tribunal, probably based in Cyprus, to prosecute Hariri's suspected killers.

UN prosecutor Serge Brammertz is investigating whether top Syrian officials ordered the assassination of Hariri and other critics of the Syrian government. His predecessor, Detlev Mehlis, has implicated officials within Mr Assad's inner circle. - (LA Times- Washington Post service)