DUBAI - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad threatened former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri just months before his murder, Syria's ex-vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam said Friday, implicating officials in Damascus.

"I will destroy anyone who tries to hinder our decisions," Assad told Hariri during a meeting in Damascus, Khaddam told Dubai-based television Al-Arabiya in an interview from Paris.

Khaddam said the meeting took place a few months before the February 14 assassination of Hariri in a Beirut bomb blast for which a UN probe has implicated Syrian intelligence.

The Syrian intelligence services could not have carried out such an operation without Assad being informed, he said, when asked if the head of state could have been unaware.

"We must await the results of the investigation, but no Syrian security service could take such a decision unilaterally," he said.

Khaddam said he had advised Hariri "to leave Lebanon because his situation regarding Syria had become complicated" in the wake of the threat. "But, of course, at no time did it occur to me that Syria could assassinate Hariri."

In late March, Syria denied a report from a UN fact-finding mission that Assad had threatened both Hariri and Lebanon's Druze leader Walid Jumblatt if they opposed the policies of Damascus, the former powerbroker in their country.

Khaddam praised the work of Detlev Mehlis who has led a UN probe into the bomb blast on the Beirut seafront that killed Hariri and 20 other people.

Mehlis was a "professional and well-known magistrate, and his report was good", he said. The chief investigator had "avoided politicising his report (to the UN Security Council) even though the crime was political".

The outgoing chief of the probe said in an interview with an Arab newspaper published in mid-December that he was convinced that Syria was responsible for the murder.

Khaddam also pointed a finger of blame for the tension in Lebanon before the murder at Rustom Ghazaleh, Syria's military intelligence chief and vice consul in Lebanon before its troop withdrawal in April after a 29-year deployment.

"Rustom Ghazaleh behaved as if he had absolute power" in Lebanon, said the former vice president, adding that he had failed to convince Assad to have him replaced.

In an interview with CNN in October, Assad vehemently rejected any notion he had played a personal role in the assassination.

Assad, whose country has repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder, said he had only found out about Hariri's assassination "from the news ... in my office" and that any Syrian found guilty should be punished.

In the Al-Arabiyah interview, Khaddam, 73, widely regarded as the architect of his government's Lebanon policy before its troop pullout, also announced the reasons for his resignation in June and his break with the regime.

He said he was "convinced that the process of development and reforms, be they political, economic or administrative, will not succeed" and preferred to choose "the motherland" over "the regime".

"I have many things to say, serious things, when the time is right," he said, adding however that his relationship with Assad remained "amicable".

The vice president first asked to resign at a congress of Syria's ruling Baath party in June.

At the time, he criticised Syrian foreign policy leading up to the withdrawal from Lebanon under international pressure over the Hariri assassination.

Khaddam, who long served Bashar's father Hafez before his death in 2000, was also close to former interior minister Ghazi Kanaan, for 20 years Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon, who committed suicide in October.

Lebanese media speculated at the time that Kanaan, who held the post before being replaced by Ghazaleh, had been killed because he was about to spill the beans on Hariri's killing.

Khaddam now lives in Paris, where he said he was writing a book and had received no threats since leaving Syria in the summer. Like Kanaan, he was also close to the pro-Western Hariri.

Kanaan and Khaddam were reportedly stripped of responsibility for the Lebanon file by Assad, in keeping with an agreement with pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud who accused the two men of being in Hariri's pay.

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