Foreign pressure felled Lebanon cabinet: Hariri

The January 12 fall of his government after the withdrawal of 11 ministers of Hezbollah and its allies followed "an order from outside which had been prepared for months and had been applied by local tools," he said.
Hariri implicitly accused Syria and Iran of having brought down his Saudi- and Western-backed government through the use of the Shiite movement Hezbollah, which is supported by Damascus and Tehran.
Any negotiation between his successor and the Future Movement on the thorny issue of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was out of the question, he said.
The UN-backed tribunal is expected to implicate Hezbollah members in the 2005 murder of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, Saad's father.
Najib Mikati, who is backed by the Hezbollah-led camp, has been appointed premier-designate and is holding talks on forming a new government which the Hariri camp has said it will boycott.
Hezbollah had demanded the Hariri government disavow the STL which the Shiite militant group accuses of being manipulated by Israel and the United States.
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