Quotes of the Day

As commanders of Lebanon's security and intelligence services, four generals were once among the most powerful and feared officials in the country. But last week, they languished in underground Beirut cells after Lebanese judicial authorities formally charged them with involvement in last February's assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Lebanese police arrested all four suspects — Jamil Sayyed, Raymond Azar, Ali Hajj and Mustafa Hamdan — as part of a United Nations–led investigation headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.

If top Lebanese officials and their backers in Syria had hoped to evade Mehlis' probe, they've since been surprised by the tenacity of a man whom a former colleague compares to a "terrier that doesn't let go once it has sunk his teeth into something." Speaking to reporters, Mehlis, best known for obtaining a difficult conviction of four people involved in the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco, refused to address the widespread Lebanese suspicion that Hariri's murder was ordered by the Syrian regime. Mehlis said, however: "We do think more people were involved."

Last week, the U.S. State Department demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad cooperate with the U.N. investigation, which thus far has been prevented from interrogating up to 15 senior Syrian officials. On Saturday, a Syrian official said that Damascus was ready to receive Mehlis, although a date has yet to be set. But even with such promises, Lebanese critics of Syria said they feared being targeted by pro-Syrian death squads intent on avenging the cedar revolution protests last spring that prompted Syrian forces to end their 29-year domination of Lebanon.

Ghattas Khoury, a defiant Hariri ally, told TIME that Lebanon's future depends on standing up to Hariri's killers. "Unless we reach the truth, there will be no stability in the country," Khoury says. "If they can kill Rafiq Hariri and get away with it, then they can kill anyone and get away with it."

But they may not: if Lebanon's ex-security chiefs are convicted, they could face a firing squad. And the U.N.'s final report, expected in October, will reveal whether Mehlis fingers others.

• NICHOLAS BLANFORD
• The investigation into the killing of the former Lebanese PM shifts up a gear