BEIRUT: Defense attorneys representing five Hezbollah suspects accused of plotting the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri are not expected to question the impartiality of two bomb experts who also investigated the 1994 Jewish Center bombing in Argentina.

Argentine officials and the international community have long accused Hezbollah of executing the attack in Buenos Aires which killed 84 people.

“I don’t intend to attack the integrity of those two experts,” said Antoine Korkmaz, who represents the interests of Mustafa Badreddine, a top Hezbollah operative. Korkmaz’s statement effectively ended speculation that the defense might question the objectivity of professors Daniel Ambrossini and Bibiana Luccioni, the Argentine explosives experts at the center of two high-profile bombing cases tied to Hezbollah.

Still, Korkmaz called into question the methodology used by the prosecutor’s office as they were investigating the attack. Specifically, Korkmaz took issue with the fact that the indictment against four Hezbollah members (a fifth, Hassan Merhi would be added later) was issued in 2011 before the Argentine experts completed their final report.

“It’s as if the expert reports had been drafted to confirm the so-called intuition of the prosecution,” Korkmaz said. Still, he denied implying that the Argentine experts had catered their research to fit the prosecution’s theory.

The Argentine case has come to new light as the prosecutor in charge of the case, Alberto Nisman, was found dead in his apartment last month, hours before he was expected to testify before the government about the case. Investigators found an indictment at the crime scene suggesting that Argentina’s president, Christina Kirchner, had covered up Hezbollah’s involvement in the crime in order to win lucrative business deals with Iran.

It was also revealed in court Tuesday that Syrian authorities had conducted a series of physical tests to determine the kind of crater a truck bomb would produce. In the Deraa countryside, one year after Hariri’s assassination, Syrian authorities exploded a truck carrying 2,000 kilograms of TNT equivalent.

When the Argentinian experts analyzed the results of the Syrian test, however, they found the results did not match with findings from their own experiments and computer simulations. “Because of these discrepancies, the tests were of little use to us,” Ambrossini testified.