29-Apr-15: Iran's terrorists-by-proxy: getting on with what they do - in quiet neighbourhoods near you

Yes, still wanted [Image Source]

Some of the killers of a bus-load of Israeli tourists bombed at a Burgas airport in Bulgaria in 2012 are still free.

If Burgas has slipped off your radar, here's a reminder of two reports we posted at the time: "20-Jul-12: US says Hezbullah and its primary sponsor Iran executed the Burgas, Bulgaria, killings" and "21-Jul-12: How involved in terror against Israelis and Jews are the Iranians?"

Authorities in the US announced on Tuesday that three Hezbollah agents, two of them accused of being behind the murderous attack on Israelis in Bulgaria, have just been put onto an official terror watch list [source: Hezbollah suspects placed on special US terror list | AFP | April 29, 2015]

The State Department named Meliad Farah, Hassan el-Hajj Hassan and Hussein Atris as "specially designated global terrorists." The terror designation makes it illegal for US citizens to engage in any transactions with the three men, and freezes any property they might possess within the United States. All three men are Lebanese by birth, but Farah was identified as an Australian national, while Hassan el-Hajj Hassan is Canadian. Meliad Farah and Hassan el-Hajj Hassan were placed on the list for their alleged role in the July 2012 suicide attack on a bus at the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria that killed six people, including five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian citizen. Hussein Atris, who the State Department said has Swedish nationality, was identified as a member of Hezbollah's overseas terrorism unit. He was arrested in 2012 in Thailand as a suspect in a plot to carry out a bombing in Bangkok and was sentenced by a Thai court to two years and eight months in prison for possessing illegally possessing explosives. He was released in September 2014, and is believed, like the other two men, to currently be in Lebanon. Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah, which is backed financially and politically by Iran, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

The formal State Department announcement is online here.

Many people may mentally dismiss the dangers posed by terrorists, like these, who spend their days and nights in far-off non-threatening Lebanon. Keep away from Lebanon, we figure, and everything's cool. But it is not entirely like that. What might not be fully appreciated is that when they are not plotting, planning and re-equipping in that lawless viper's nest of Islamist bombers and other terrorist thugs, these people - as the AFP report points out - move freely in their second homes: Australia, Canada, Sweden.

A Sydney Morning Herald report ["Australian Meliad Farah will be tried for Israeli tourist bus bombing in Bulgaria", September 13, 2013] suggested a little misleadingly that the suspected killer named as Meliad Farah was going to be indicted and tried real soon. But in reality, the 32-year-old better known in Australia (where he holds citizenship and - contrary to the FBI statement - where he was born) as Hussein Hussein, has not actually been arrested. Yet.

The other murder-by-terrorism fugitive, Hassan el-Hajj Hassan, lived in Canada from the time he was eight years old [source]. Chances are he looks and seems more like an ordinary resident of Winnipeg than a Middle Easterner.

Speaking of terrorists: Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's
ambassador to the United Nations, [Image Source]

How much simpler life would be if jihadis and Islamism-fuelled killers had posters glued to their foreheads saying who they are and what they plan to do. Unfortunately figuring out who they are and when and where they next intend to attack unsuspecting victims can be a serious and complicated challenge.

As for connecting them with the government of Iran's burgeoning terrorism wing, the Iranians themselves say that's unfair. No less a personage than Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations His Excellency Mr Mohammad Khazaee said it was Israel, not his own country. that actually carried out the Burgas airport bus bombing attack. How so? Because of this compelling argument:

"Such [a] terrorist operation could only be planned and carried out by the same regime whose short history is full of state terrorism operations and assassinations aimed at implicating others for narrow political gains..." [Telegraph UK, July 26, 2012]

The Iranian added for good measure that there were many examples of when Israel had killed "its own citizens or innocent Jewish people in order to blame others", and said it was "suspicious" that Israel had accused Iran of masterminding the bombing so soon after the attack.

There are some additional insights into this charming man's approach to diplomacy in a revealing February 2013 article on the Forbes Magazine site: "Meet Iran's Ambassador to the UN":

With his neat mustache and well-cut jackets, Khazaee looks like the very model of an earnest diplomat... Khazaee is one of the Iranian ambassadors described in the complaint as having directed the activities of the Alavi Foundation, starting soon after his 2007 arrival as Iran’s envoy to the U.N. in New York... Protected by diplomatic immunity, he remains an urbane presence at the U.N., with access to Manhattan, making connections, peddling propaganda, turning up last year on TV’s Charlie Rose talk show... If Khazaee, with his mannered inflections and his buttoned vest, appears worlds removed from Iran’s goose-stepping Revolutionary Guards, or Iran’s boorish President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (threatening in his lounge suit to wipe Israel off the map), that’s because Khazaee’s job is to cover for them on the diplomatic stage. [Forbes]

We happen to have written in the past about the Alavi Foundation that's mentioned in the Forbes quote. See "18-Sep-13: Striking back at the money that enables the terrorists" and "19-Apr-14: One small step for civilized society; one substantial leap in the fight against the terrorists"

A small measure of how insane some aspects of international relations have become in this terrorism-rich age: Khazaee - who on 14 September 2011 publicly accused Obama and the US of deploying "nuclear blackmail against a non-nuclear-weapon state", namely his country, Iran - was elected Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly.

18-Sep-13: Striking back at the money that enables the terrorists

650 Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street
[Image Source]

From National Post, Canada, yesterday: "Canadian bank accounts linked to Iranian government frozen as terror victims seek damages"

A judge has frozen more than a dozen Canadian bank accounts linked to the government of Iran at the request of victims trying to collect damages from the Islamic republic over its sponsorship of Middle East terror groups. The list of Iran’s accounts and other state assets in Canada was disclosed last week by the Department of Foreign Affairs in an effort to help victims hold Tehran responsible for financing, training and arming Hezbollah and Hamas. The five-page decision by Justice David Brown of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ordered banks to lock down the 14 Royal Bank, Scotiabank, CIBC and BMO accounts named by Foreign Affairs, which contain at least $2.6-million. Banks were given until Friday to disclose the names of the account holders and their contact information to lawyers representing the victims. On Sept. 30, the lawyers are scheduled to return to court to ask for a default judgment against Iran... The Ontario court order is the latest fallout from legislation enacted last year that allows victims of terrorism committed anywhere in the world since Jan. 1, 1985 to seek redress through Canadian courts. While foreign governments were previously shielded from lawsuits, the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act lifted that immunity from nations Canada has designated state sponsors of terrorism. Iran and Syria were placed on the list of state sponsors last September. Tehran has long bankrolled Palestinian terrorists, partly through its militant Revolutionary Guards Corp. It has also used the Lebanese Shi’ite extremist group Hezbollah as a proxy force for attacking Iranian targets internationally, from South America to Europe.

In a separate seizure/forfeiture action against Iran, perhaps the largest court-ordered asset seizure ever, a court in New York City ruled [see the court order here] that federal authorities could seize a 36-storey Fifth Avenue office tower worth half a billion dollars or more from its owners, Alavi Foundation and Assa Company, declaring them to be fronts for the Iranian regime. (This 2009 report provides some of the background as of when this legal effort got started.)

Assa, the entity that holds a 35 percent share in the building, has a single solitary employee and is registered in in the British Channel Islands tax haven of Jersey. (More details on Wikipedia.) 

A Justice Department announcement, published yesterday, says:

"Assa was (and is) a front for Bank Melli, and thus a front for the Government of Iran.’ The Judge’s ruling that Alavi and Assa committed IEEPA and money laundering violations paves the way for the largest-ever terrorism-related forfeiture, and provides a means of compensating victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.”

From the Alavi Foundation's website

The 36-storey building, located at the corner of 650 Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street on the edge of Rockefeller Center, was once called the Piaget Building. It was constructed during the time of the Iranian Shah on behalf of his Pahlavi Foundation, and then seized in December 2008 by the Asset Forfeiture Unit and Terrorism and National Security Unit of the US Attorney's Office. 

Last year, we surveyed here just some of the Iranian-enabled terrorist attacks directed around the world. Counterjihad Report says

Victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks have secured billions of dollars in civil judgments against the Islamic Republic for financing and providing other assistance to the killers. Little of those damages have been collected, however, as victims often find themselves fighting the U.S. government in their attempts to seize Iranian assets in the United States. 

With this week's breakthrough, the US government can proceed to turn a small part of Iran's holding into cash and ultimately provide compensation to some of Iranian-funded terrorism's many victims. Perhaps a corner has now been turned. 

15-Feb-12: Is New York threatened by an Iranian attack? You might be surprised to know how real this is.

The Piaget Building on Fifth Avenue: Seized by US authorities
in 2009 because it was secretly controlled by Iran's government.
Iran's covert actions have already had deadly consequences
in major American cities.  

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the director of intelligence analysis for New York City's police department wrote a thoughtful and revealing analysis of a major terrorist threat  Here are some of his main points - but the whole article is worth the three minutes of reading (and the hours of pondering that may come afterwards) that it will take.

• Less than two weeks ago, on February 3, 2012, the religious leader who rules Iran, "Supreme Leader Ayatollah" Ali Khamenei, said in a widely publicized speech that Iran has "its own tools" to respond to Western sanctions and threats of military action directed against Iran. 
• Confirming this, James Clapper, the United States Director of National Intelligence, testified during January to the US Senate that the Iranians are "willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime."
• To illustrate: in October 2011, an American "of Iranian descent" (as the news media delicately put it) hired a killer from one of the Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. This attempted murder was directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and involved blowing up a Washington DC restaurant. It's notable (though barely commented upon in the news reports) that hundreds of restaurant patrons would likely have been killed too had the plot not been thwarted.
• Background: for decades, Iran's government has established a documented record of exploiting its official presence in foreign places to carry out coordinated terrorist attacks and killings, sometimes with the assistance of Lebanese Hezbollah agents in their control. 
• The bombings of Jewish community buildings in Buenos Aires in 1992 (29 killed) and again in 1994  (85 killed) provided some lessons for the NYPD.  The Iranian agents responsible for those terrorist outrages had been sent to Argentina years before the attacks. They became integrated into local society. They took on Argentine nationality. The chief imam of the At-Tauhid mosque in Buenos Aires was the head of the gang and its main co-ordinator. [There is an open Interpol warrant for his arrest.] He had been in Argentina since 1983, including a stint as the cultural attache to the Iranian Embassy in Argentina. So he had diplomatic immunity. 
• The Hezbollah agents brought in for the attack on innocent Argentine civilians received support from the local Lebanese-Shiite community in Buenos Aries, as well as from the 'diplomats' of the Iranian Embassy.
• Iran's Hezbollah clients later tried to duplicate the Argentine results in a series of failed attempts in Azerbaijan, Egypt and Turkey. Iranian agents in New York have already shown similar intentions. For instance, two guards at Iran's mission to the United Nations in NYC were sent home by the State Department in 2004 after conducting surveillance of city subways and landmarks. And in 2008, two Staten Island men pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah.
• In nearby Philadelphia, 26 people were indicted in federal court in 2009 for conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group.
• Lebanese-linked businesses in the greater NYC area are implicated in a massive money-laundering scheme benefiting Hezbollah. This came to light in December 2011 in a case filed by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
• 18 other Hezbollah-related cases have been brought in federal courts across the United States since 2000.
• As the NY police see it, the city's large Jewish population makes it "increasingly attractive target".  Iran's U.N. mission in the city allows officials from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence to live and operate in New York with official diplomatic cover. 
• Iran's Alavi Foundation, described as a not-for-profit devoted to charity works and promoting Islamic culture, is "a front for the government of Iran" according to Preet Bharara, the high profile US  Attorney for the Southern District of New York. His office in conjunction with the NYPD Intelligence Division seized Alavi's assets, including the largest Shiite mosque in the city and the location most closely affiliated with Iran's U.N. mission.

Site of another focus of Iran's interest in big city
real estate: the AMIA Jewish community building
in Buenos Aires, destroyed in a terrorist attack in 1994.
Iran is believed to be behind the massacre in
which 85 innocents, mostly Argentinian Jews, were killed. 

Let's review for a moment what is known about the Alavi Foundation affair. It's instructive.

The legal attack via the NY courts  was described as "one of the biggest counter-terrorism seizures in American history" but it's a certainty that most of our readers have never heard of it. The more-or-less unknown foundation's assets include bank accounts, Islamic schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than a hundred acres of prime land in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower, called the Piaget Building (no connection to the jewelry firm of the same name) at 760 Fifth Avenue in New York. 

The case presented by the prosecution was that the so-called not-for-profit Alavi Foundation managed the Piaget tower on behalf of Iran's government, working through a front company, Assa Corp. In this way, it illegally funnelled millions in rental income to Iran's state-owned Bank Melli which the US Treasury says provides support for Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Under US law, doing any business with Bank Melli is illegal.

It may be hard to comprehend that terrorist activity can be taking not only right under American noses but literally just down the block from some of New York's and America's most powerful and sensitive New York-based institutions.

Is there a real and present danger? It will always be hard to know until it's already happened, as it did yesterday in Bangkok and New Delhi. By then of course it's too late, at least for the immediate victims.