Lebanon said it is searching for 6 persons that left for Australia from Beirut airport just hours after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in the downtown of Beirut, leaving trace of TNT explosives on their seats in the plane.

The Lebanese minister of justice Adnan Adoum said those persons have links to what he called "extremist circles" but without disclosing their identity or giving more details in order, as he stated, to preserve the course of investigations.

At the beginning, the Lebanese authorities expected the hypothesis of the suicide operation but the size of destruction which was inflected by the explosion had gradually brought in the hypothesis of the use of strong explosives implanted on the road taken by Hariri's procession.

Lebanon appealed for the experience of Switzerland in identifying the explosives and the DNA.

Lebanon, Politics, 2/19/2005

Lebanon 'thwarts al-Qaeda plot'
BBC News - Sept. 22, 2004