AFTER BEIRUT BLAST, ISRAEL REVIVES TALES OF HEZBOLLAH AMMONIUM NITRATE
TERROR PLOTS
GARETH PORTERAUGUST 26, 2020
LEBANON
Israeli intelligence is polishing off a dubious propaganda campaign to
suggest Hezbollah was to blame for the recent catastrophe in Beirut. But the
factual record either contradicts Israeli claims or reveals a complete
dearth of evidence.
By Gareth Porter
Israeli officials have exploited the massive explosion at the Port of Beirut
this August to revive a dormant propaganda campaign that had accused the
Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah of storing ammonium nitrate
in several countries to wage terror attacks on Israelis.
The Israeli intelligence apparatus had planted a series of stories from 2012
to 2019 claiming Hezbollah sought out ammonium nitrate as the explosive of
choice for terrorist operations. According to the narrative, Hezbollah
planned to covertly store the explosive substance in locations from
Southeast Asia to Europe and the US - only to be foiled repeatedly by
Mossad. In each one of those cases, however, the factual record either
contradicted the Israeli claims or revealed a complete dearth of evidence.
The narrative first debuted in the Israeli press after a June 2019 story in
the British pro-Israel daily The Telegraph on alleged Hezbollah storage of
the explosive around London. The Times of Israel introduced for the first
time the much broader theme that Hezbollah planned to use the explosive for
"huge, game-changing attacks on Israeli targets globally."
Next, "new details" appeared in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth from
"unnamed Israeli intelligence officials," disclosing how Israel had
supposedly stymied ammonium nitrate-based terror plots by Hezbollah in
London, Cyprus and Thailand.
Following the calamity of the Beirut explosion, the narrative story was
opportunistically revived in the Israeli media, with The Times of Israel
summarizing an Israeli Channel 13 report citing an "unsourced assessment"
that Hezbollah "apparently planned to use the ammonium nitrate stockpile
that caused a massive blast at Beirut's port this week against Israel in a
'Third Lebanon War'."
A review of the supposedly open-and-shut cases in both Thailand and Cyprus,
however, reveals serious questions about the evidence used to accuse
Hezbollah suspects and the role of the Mossad in those cases. It also shows
that an alleged Hezbollah plot involving ammonium nitrate in New York City
was contrived by the FBI and Justice Department without any real evidence.
Thailand: Muddling the Issue, Bending the Law
The arrest of Hussein Atris, a dual Swedish-Lebanese citizen, in Bangkok on
January 13, 2012 occurred after the Mossad received a report that a
terrorist attack was due to occur in the middle of that month. The Israeli
intelligence agency had given the Thai police a list of 14 or 15 suspects -
all Iranian or Lebanese - to be placed under surveillance, including Atris.
But it was Atris who received the bulk of attention. After his arrest, he
told police about goods he had stored in a commercial building in Bangkok.
Shortly after his arrest, he was taken out of his cell to a house where he
was interrogated by three Mossad agents, as was typical of Mossad operations
in countries where Israel cultivated close relations with law enforcement.
On January 17, Thai police visited the commercial building near Bangkok and
reportedly found 4.8 tons of urea fertilizer and 40 liters (100 pounds) of
ammonium nitrate.
Atris was immediately charged by the police with "possession of prohibited
substances." But in fact, the ammonium nitrate that Atris had stored in the
building was not illegal; it was merely a component of frozen gel packs for
sore muscles commonly bought and sold wholesale and retail all over the
world.
The boxes of gel packs were stored along with electric fans, slippers and
copy paper on the second floor of the building. And as Atris explained to
his interrogators and to a reporter from the Swedish daily Aftonbladet who
interviewed him in jail, he had been purchasing various goods in Asia and
exporting them to other countries like Liberia. He had already arranged for
a freighter to ship the goods he had stored there, as the chief of Bangkok
metropolitan police confirmed in an interview with the New York Times.
The Mossad interrogators refused to accept the explanation by Atris and
accused him of lying about his business. Further clouding the picture,
police found two tons of urea fertilizer in bags labeled as cat litter on
the same floor as the cold packs. But Atris told an interviewer he had never
dealt with fertilizer in his business, and that he believed "it must have
been placed in our storage facility by someone, probably Mossad."
Mossad and its Thai allies were committed to the idea that Atris was a
Hezbollah operative from the beginning, even though they apparently had no
actual hard evidence to back it up. The claim of Hezbollah membership was
nevertheless sold successfully to cooperative local and national news media.
A Reuters story headlined "Thailand: Hezbollah man arrested in terror
scare." When he was brought to trial in 2013, Atris firmly denied any links
to Hezbollah, and the court ultimately found that there was no evidence to
support the contention by the police and Mossad that he was in any way
involved with the Lebanese movement.
International press coverage of the case blurred details in a way that
incorrectly suggested terrorist intent. When Atris's case went to trial in
July 2013, Agence-France Presse falsely reported that he and "unidentified
accomplices" had "packed more than six tons of ammonium nitrate into bags,"
thus confusing the already commercially-packaged cold packs with the urea
fertilizer, which was not an illegal substance under Thai law and which he
specifically denied owning. Time magazine distorted the case more seriously
by referring to the bags of urea fertilizer as "chemicals being assembled
into explosives.in bags labeled as kitty litter."
In the end, Atris was convicted of "illegal possession" of ammonium nitrate,
which was a banned substance under Thai law. However, the country had not
intended for the provision to apply to frozen gel packs for pain relief,
which are commonly traded in bulk internationally.
Despite the absence of any evidence that Atris was either a Hezbollah agent
or a terrorist, the US State Department bowed to its Israeli allies and
declared him to be "a member of Hezbollah's overseas terrorist unit."
Cyprus: The mysterious appearance of ammonium nitrate
In 2015, the Cypriot government's prosecuted Canadian-Lebanese Hussein
Bassam Abdallah for allegedly being part of a Hezbollah ammonium nitrate
terrorist plot after police found 420 boxes of the fertilizer in the house
where he was staying. Yet virtually no details about the case were ever
released because the entire legal process took place behind closed doors.
What's more, Abdallah's defense was never made public.
Furthermore, information from the Kuwaiti daily Al-Jarida, which Israelis
have often used to disseminate propaganda into the Arab Middle East, raises
serious questions about the origin of the ammonium nitrate found in the
house where Abdallah was staying. The newspaper published a story citing a
"private source" who said that Mossad agents had been tracking Abdallah,
following his every movement and intercepting all his phone calls from
Cyprus. The Mossad surveillance continued, according to the story, "until he
obtained the materials and fertilizer, after which Cypriot authorities were
informed [and] raided his place of residence and arrested him and seized two
tons of [ammonium nitrate].."
By reporting an apparent Mossad account that the ammonium nitrate was not at
the house until just before Mossad tipped off the police, the Al-Jarida
account obviously suggested that the timing of its appearance was not merely
coincidental.
This was not the first time that Mossad-related evidence against one of its
targets turned out to be highly suspect. Two Iranian men who were visiting
Mombasa, Kenya in 2012 were charged with having buried 15 kg of the
explosive RDX on a golf course. However, they had been interrogated - and
one of them allegedly drugged - by three Mossad agents. Though Kenyan police
had supposedly been carrying out constant surveillance on them for the
entire length of their stay, no direct evidence of the Iranians ever
possessing RDX came to light. That anomaly resulted in the case against the
Iranians being thrown out by Kenya's Court of Appeal , and suggested that
Mossad itself had planted the explosive on the golf course.
In Abdallah's case, the evidence also indicated the use of a classical
prosecution tactic was employed to force him to admit to a Hezbollah
ammonium nitrate terrorism plot: forcing a plea bargain on him by the threat
of a much longer sentence if he refused to plead guilty.
After the first week of interrogation, a Cypriot security official told a
journalist that Abdallah denied all charges against him and was not
"cooperating" - meaning he was not admitting what both Israel and Cyprus
wanted him to. Weeks later, however, following a trial closed to the public,
Abdallah admitted to all eight charges against him. The semi-official Cyprus
News Agency reported he had given the police a statement that the ammonium
nitrate was to have been used for terrorist attacks against Jewish or
Israeli interests in Cyprus. In return he was given a six-year sentence
instead of the 14 years he would have received without the deal.
Abdallah's defense lawyer, Savvas A. Angelides, pressed his client to accept
the plea bargain, advancing the political interests of Cyprus as a close
ally of Israel. For his part, Angelides had his eyes on a high-level
national security posting in his country's government. Sure enough, in early
2018, the lawyer was appointed Defense Minister of Cyprus.
The idea that Hezbollah obtained ammonium nitrate for use in New York City -
another Israeli contention - was not supported by any evidence whatsoever.
In this case, a Lebanese-American named Ali Kourani stood accused of
hatching a Hezbollah terror plot. But the closest the US Justice Department
could come to linking to ammonium nitrate was a statement in its criminal
complaint against him.
It claimed that in May 2009, Kourani "entered China at an airport in
Guangzhou, the location of Guangzhou Company-1, i.e., the manufacturer of
the ammonium nitrate-based First Aid ice packs sized in connection with
thwarted IJO attacks in Thailand and Cyprus." The suggestion that a trip to
Quangzhou somehow counted as evidence of an effort to procure ammonium
nitrate for Hezbollah terrorism was patently absurd.
London and Germany: Mossad's phantom Hezbollah explosives
The next apparent Israeli intel dump arrived in the form of a June 2019
story in the Telegraph UK, a right-wing Murdoch-owned daily which loyally
follows Israeli propaganda lines. According to the report, in 2015, the UK
MI5 intelligence service and London's Metropolitan Police were tipped off by
the Mossad about thousands of ice packs containing three tons of ammonium
nitrate in warehouses in Northwest London. The Telegraph revealed that
London police had arrested one man "on suspicion of plotting terrorism" but
had eventually released him without charges. That detail was the giveaway
that the British had come to realize that they had no evidence linking cold
packs or their owner to any Hezbollah terrorist plot - contrary to the
Israel narrative.
The Telegraph's suggestion that MI5 decided not to prosecute to disrupt the
threat isn't credible, because no one was ever prosecuted. And its
implication that the British government kept quiet about the episode because
it was protecting the Iran nuclear deal did not apply once Trump tore up the
agreement in 2018. The British government, which banned Hezbollah in
February 2020, has never suggested that the Lebanese militia had been
plotting to use ammonium nitrate from warehouses in the UK to carry out
terrorist attacks.
According to a report this May by Israel's Channel 12, days before Germany
announced its banning of Hezbollah from the country, Mossad had gathered
information on alleged Hezbollah terrorism-related activities in Germany.
The supposed plotting consisted of the identification of warehouses in
southern Germany where the Mossad said Hezbollah was storing 'hundreds of
kilograms" of ammonium nitrate.
After the information was presented to German intelligence and law
enforcement agencies, according to the report, the German Interior Ministry
announced in April 2020 that it was banning Hezbollah. It simultaneously
raided four mosque associations accused of being close to Hezbollah. But
German law enforcement never announced any action regarding warehouses
supposedly holding ammonium nitrate, indicating that the German government
found nothing that backed up the claims by Mossad.
Hoping to seize the Beirut explosion as a historic propaganda opportunity,
the Israelis clearly believe they can fashion a new and more powerful
narrative by knitting together false claims related to these episodes. Their
objective is to achieve their longtime objective of forcing Hezbollah out of
the Lebanese government by implicating it in the calamitous blast. So far,
Western corporate media appears inclined to accept the baseless Israeli
claims on face value. The day after the blast in Beirut, the Washington Post
reported that Hezbollah "has long shown an interest in acquiring [ammonium
nitrate] for use in a variety of terrorist plots."
