The case involving the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harriri took a spectacular turn over the weekend when the German magazine Der Spiegel released the news that the Special Tribunal set up to investigate the assassination (and other political murders in Lebanon) has found smoking gun evidence that connects the Lebanese political party/terrorist group Hezb'allah directly to the murder.

The Tribunal will not release the information for fear that it would set off sectarian violence in Lebanon as well as influence the parliamentary elections next month - something the 11 man tribunal does not want to do.

If true - and the evidence seems rock solid - it may overturn the appelcart in Lebanon, slow Hezb'allah's drive for control of parliament, and perhaps even drive Hezb'allah's Christian allies in the Free Patriotic Movement away from them.

Der Spiegle's Erich Follath has the shocking details:

According to the detailed information provided by the SPIEGEL source, the fact that the case may have been "cracked" is the result of a mixture of serendipity à la Sherlock Holmes and the state-of-the-art technology used by cyber detectives. In months of painstaking work, a secretly operating special unit of the Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area surrounding Hariri on the days leading up to the attack and on the date of the murder itself. The investigators referred to these mobile phones as the "first circle of hell."

Captain Eid's team eventually identified eight mobile phones, all of which had been purchased on the same day in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They were activated six weeks before the assassination, and they were used exclusively for communication among their users and -- with the exception of one case -- were no longer used after the attack. They were apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack.

But there was also a "second circle of hell," a network of about 20 mobile phones that were identified as being in proximity to the first eight phones noticeably often. According to the Lebanese security forces, all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the "operational arm" of Hezbollah, which maintains a militia in Lebanon that is more powerful than the regular Lebanese army.

"The report in Der Spiegel is very, very, very dangerous," Nasrallah said in comments transmitted via video link to thousands of supporters massed in the southern suburbs.

"I consider the report in Der Spiegel an Israeli accusation that Hizbullah killed the martyr Rafik Hariri and we will deal with this claim as such," he said in a speech marking the ninth anniversary of the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.

He warned that the report was "more dangerous than Ain el-Rummaneh bus attack" which [was responsible for starting] the Lebanese 15-year civil war.

"This is why we have to deal with it responsibly because it is an agenda to stir strife," he said.

"Israel has issued its verdict in the Hariri case," he said.