29-May-15: Wary eyes on Hezbollah's Cyprus and Southern Lebanon battlefields [UPDATED]

The bomb-making materials were found in this Larnaca residence
[Image Source]

Reuters (via Lebanon's Daily Star) says today that some 400 boxes - two tons, 67,000 packages - of ammonium nitrate stashed away in the basement of a private home in the coastal town of Larnaca, Cyprus, led police there to suspect and then arrest an unnamed Canadian and detain him in connection with terrorism charges. The few published facts include that he is 26 and born in Lebanon.

Ammonium nitrate is a fertilizer but in large quantities can be mixed with other substances to make a powerful explosive... [P] police suspected Israeli interests were the target, and one said that authorities believed the ammonium nitrate had been amassing at the residence for some time... Cyprus is a popular holiday destination for Israelis and the island hosts an Israeli embassy in Nicosia... The suspect arrived in Cyprus in the third week of May and had been staying at the two-storey house in a residential suburb... [Reuters, today]

Reuters does not get around to mentioning it but the suspect had €10,000 in cash on him [Cyprus Mail, May 28, 2015] when arrested.

And this:

The Phileleftheros newspaper [Cyprus' major news source] said the 26-year-old man, who was remanded in custody on Thursday, belonged to the Lebanese organisation's military wing and had personal links to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

How involved with terror is Cyprus? Here's what Reuters writes:

Despite its proximity to the Middle East, Cyprus has seen little militant-related activity in recent decades. Its last major security incident was a botched attack on the Israeli embassy in 1988, which killed three people. In 2013 a Swedish citizen of Lebanese descent was jailed in Cyprus on charges of plotting an attack on Israeli tourists. He said he had been asked by Hezbollah to track the movements of Israeli tourists on the island, but denied he was planning any attack. [[Reuters, today]

Though they call it "little militant-related activity", Cyprus does have some sense of what might be going on under its noses. In that 1988 attack

a car packed with explosives exploded on a Nicosia bridge, killing three. The car was meant to target the Israeli Embassy. [CBC News Canada, yesterday]

Then just over two years ago (as we reported here: "21-Mar-13: First conviction of Hezbollah terrorist in a European court"), another Lebanese, this time with a second Swedish passport, was convicted in a Cypriot court of "membership in a criminal organization", meaning Hezbollah. The charges had originally included terrorism; they were reduced a year before the trial to merely criminal matters.

The offences then (and as seems likely this time too) involved preparing to attack Israeli tourists on Cyprus. The accused happily admitted that he has was with Hezbollah, had been since 2007 and that he did "relatively simple tasks", like hand-carrying packages between European cities, observe Jews (!), watch Israeli flights land in Cyprus, go to and from Dubai, and record the activities of buses carrying Israeli tourists. He also admitted to having been trained to use RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and machine guns: "I work for my party. Whenever they asked me to do something, I delivered."

The murderous Hezbollah attack on Israelis in the airport car park of the Bulgarian Black Sea resort Burgas in the summer of 2012 seems to been executed by people with just that sort of training and rather similar goals.

At the time of the March 2013 criminal conviction, Hezbollah was not classified as a terror organization by the EU. Then four months later, the EU governments finally acted, deciding in the wake of the Cyprus court decision

to list the armed wing of Hezbollah as a terrorist group because of concerns over its activities in Europe... The US and Israel have spent years urging the EU to outlaw Hezbollah outright... But the EU ignored pressure... to ban the Lebanese organisation outright... [The Guardian, July 22, 2013]

[Here's a link to our commentary at the time: "22-Jul-13: One of Hezbollah's "wings", the terrorist one, is finally outlawed in Europe"]

From an Israeli standpoint, the issues go way beyond pressure or politics. We saw a memo earlier this week, authored by Omri Ceren at The Israel Project, reflecting some of the current thinking about what Hezbollah stands for (whether outlawed or not). A handful of relevant highlights:

• [T]here's a lot of chatter in the Middle East about a summer war between Israel and Lebanon... On one hand the Israelis and Hezbollah are saying the same thing: all of southern Lebanon is now one big military compound. But only the Israelis are pointing out that Hezbollah has made sure that in that compound there are tens of thousands of civilians. 
• The Israelis can't afford a war of attrition with Hezbollah. The Iran-backed terror group has the ability to saturation bomb Israeli civilians with 1,500 projectiles a day, every day, for over two months. They will try to bring down Tel Aviv's skyscrapers with ballistic missiles. They will try to fly suicide drones into Israel's nuclear reactor. They will try to detonate Israel's off-shore energy infrastructure. They will try to destroy Israeli military and civilian runways. And - mainly but not exclusively through their tunnels - they will try to overrun Israeli towns and drag away women and children as hostages. Israeli casualties would range in the thousands to tens of thousands.
• Hezbollah is counting on the resulting deaths of their human shields - and they've guaranteed to that the body count will be significant - to turn Israel into an international pariah...
• [Iranian-backed Hezbollah] has built a sprawling underground array of tunnels, bunkers and surveillance outposts along the border with Israel, which it is manning at peak readiness for battle... highly-advanced, with durable concrete, a 24-hour power supply via underground generators, a ventilation system to prevent damp from damaging military equipment and a web of secondary escape shafts in case of attack... housing tens of thousands of rockets ready for launch...

In Europe, they deal with such issues via lawyers, judges and prosecutors. Here, the urgency, lethality and scale of the potential consequences demand a much broader, sharper and more expensive approach - one that most people on our side wholeheartedly would have preferred to see avoided.

UPDATE Friday July 3, 2015:

Cyprus jailed a member of the armed wing of Hezbollah for six years on Monday after he pleaded guilty to charges of stockpiling explosives to attack Jewish targets abroad. Hussein Bassam Abdallah, 26, who has dual Canadian and Lebanese nationality, was arrested in late May after Cypriot authorities found 8.2 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a potential explosive, in the basement of a house in the coastal city of Larnaca. Abdallah pleaded guilty to charges of possessing explosives, conspiracy to commit a crime, aiding and abetting a terrorist organisation and participation in a terrorist group, the state Cyprus News Agency (CNA) reported. Authorities believe that the ammonium nitrate had been stockpiled in Cyprus since around 2011 and held in the basement of a home in a residential neighbourhood of Larnaca. In a statement to police, Abdallah said the fertiliser would have been used to attack Jewish or Israeli interests in Cyprus, CNA reported. [Reuters]

10-Jun-13: Will appeasing Hezbollah work better now than it did with Nazi Germany?

Britain's pre-war prime minister Neville Chamberlin, engaging
in a catastrophic policy that made sense at the time
to many observers [Image Source: NY Times]

Death tolls don't attract readers. Unless you have a strategic stake in an ongoing war, you will likely avert your eyes (especially if you're mainly on the dying side, as opposed to the killing side) when the tally of dead in this conflict or that appears in the news.

Syria has been the site of an appalling state-sanctioned bloodbath for more than two years. When the UN stopped conducting its own death count there in January 2012, the senior UN human rights official Navi Pillay said the toll was more than 5,000. We went to the website of the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights earlier today. There [this page] they offer these heart-stopping updated numbers:

• People killed since the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad: 83,598
• Of whom the number of civilians killed is 74,993.
• Of that number of civilians, 8,393 are children and 7,686 are women. 
• The number tortured to death: 2,441.

Smaller, more human-scale numbers, are easier for some to visualize. So the same organization's home page gives these numbers for the deaths of just the past few days: Thursday June 6: 84. Wednesday June 5: 69. Tuesday June 4: 91.

Just numbers, true. But signifying dead humans and lost lives.

It's horrifying. But now please note that the leaders of Hezbollah, the Shi'ite Islamist terrorists based in Lebanon, want those numbers to become bigger and better. A Lebanese news source says its leaders vowed today

to continue to help Syrian President Bashar Assad in his two-year-old civil war against rebels, while insisting the party be involved in national government decisions... "We will not change our position on protecting our people and the backbone of the resistance [Syria] regardless of intensified pressure locally, regionally and internationally,” Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nabil Qaouk said... "The more the threats and the more the pressures are exerted on us, the more the spirit of the resistance and enthusiasm has flared..."

The bogus claim to be at the heart of something called 'resistance' has served Hezbollah well. It gets very substantial military training, weapons, explosives and money, as well as political, diplomatic and organizational aid, from Iran (Wikipedia). In fact, for all practical purposes it serves as an arm of the Iranian leadership. It gets additional cash, and support, from Shi'ites living in West Africa, the United States and the tri-border South American area where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet.

Hezbollah has not always been as open about the murderous role it is playing in the Syrian killing fields. Its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted to that role in a May 25, 2013 address that MEMRI also translated to English. Hezbollah "cannot stand idly by" he said, while the Syrian regime is embroiled in civil war. It was an admission that caused outrage in the non-Shi'ite parts of the Arab world, particularly in the Arab/Persian Gulf (we don't take sides in that naming battle), with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), convening in Saudi Arabia last Sunday, deciding (see Al-Watan newspaper) "to examine taking measures against Hizbullah's interests". As with most of Nasrallah's pronouncements, it was deliberate and calculated.

Hezbollah has become a so-called 'state within a state' in its native Lebanon, but has grown lethally active in other places too, particularly in Europe. Reuters pointed out a few days ago that while there are increasingly focused efforts to outlaw Hezbollah in Europe, this

would mark a major policy shift for the European Union, which has resisted pressure from Israel and Washington to do so for years. [Reuters]

One of the factors behind the push to blacklist the Shi'ites is a terror attack carried out this past summer in a Black Sea vacation resort called Burgas. A Bulgarian bus driver was killed, along with 5 Israeli tourists. 32 more were injured. A bomb exploded on their bus at Burgas airport, minutes after they flew in on an Israeli charter flight. Two Hezbollah "activists" were fingered along with an unfortunate third man who died while putting the bomb inside the bus. The intelligence forces of Bulgaria, Israeli and the US, as well as Europol, have said Hezbollah carried out the cold-blooded atrocity. They also believe Hezbollah's Iran-driven terrorism is on the move, spreading out to other parts of the world.

Though sober voices in Europe choose to deny this enlargement of the Hezbollah terror footprint, people closer to the action know better. As we noted here, the parliament of Bahrain, for instance, decided two months ago

to label the Lebanese militia a terrorist organization, the Lebanon-based news outlet Now Lebanon reported. Tensions have been high since Bahrain accused Hezbollah of seeking to overthrow its government in 2011 ["26-Mar-13: Hezbollah is declared "terrorist group" by Bahrain's parliament"]

Also in March, a criminal court in Cyprus convicted a Hezbollah man on terrorism charges ["21-Mar-13: First conviction of Hezbollah terrorist in a European court"].

And last week, the editorial writers at (wait for this) the Saudi Gazette, said

Hezbollah needs to be seen for the ruthless terrorist organization that it really is

which we think wraps things up quite accurately.

But, sadly, not for the Europeans. A few days ago

A British request to blacklist the armed wing of Hezbollah ran into opposition in the European Union on Tuesday, with several governments expressing concern that such a move would increase instability in the Middle East [Reuters].

It goes on to say that "several EU governments questioned whether there was sufficient evidence to link Hezbollah to the attack in Bulgaria" and that there were 

"concerns that such a move would complicate the EU's contacts with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is part of the coalition government, and could increase turmoil in a country already suffering a spillover of civil war from Syria... More discussions on the issue will be held in Brussels in the next two weeks, with a decision possibly taken by the end of the month, diplomats said.

Italy's Foreign Minister Emma Bonino says her government needs more evidence from Bulgaria. Also, that it is concerned for "the fragility of Lebanon", which may surprise some Italians. According to Herb Keinon at the Jerusalem Post, Israeli officials said last week that the Irish are playing a dominant role in the effort to protect Hezbollah. Ireland currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. In last Tuesday's working group discussion, the Irish pro-Hezbollah position was backed by Sweden and Finland.

Note that France, which has for years been one of the group covering Hezbollah's back in these efforts to outlaw the terrorists, has lately stopped objecting to blacklisting them. The French have said (presumably because they see the reports that many others do, including the Lebanese report we quoted above) that thousands of Hezbollah men are fighting alongside the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They are up to their arm-pits in gore and murder.

As for the Bulgarians, Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary Magazine a few days ago ["Hezbollah’s European Appeasers"], says

The new Bulgarian government, which is led by the country’s former Communist party, is now claiming they are no longer certain that Hezbollah was responsible for the Burgas attack. It should be noted that the Bulgarian switch is not the result of the emergence of new evidence about the attack or even a change of heart by Hezbollah, whose terrorist cadres are now fighting in Syria to try and save the faltering Bashar Assad regime, another Iranian ally. There is no more doubt today that Burgas was the work of Hezbollah than there was in the days after the attack when the identities of the terrorists were revealed. It is simply the result of a political party coming to power that is hostile to the United States and friendlier to Russia and therefore determined to undermine any effort to forge a united European response to Middle East-based Islamist terror.

Tobin makes articulately a point that we wish we had written:

International unity on terrorism is illusory. The willingness of some Europeans, whether acting out of sympathy for the Islamists or antipathy for Israel and the Untied States, to treat Hezbollah terrorists as somehow belonging to a different, less awful category of criminal than those who might primarily target other Westerners is a victory for the Islamists... The effort to appease Hezbollah is not only a sign of Russian influence but also a signal to Iran that many in Europe are untroubled by its terrorist campaign against Israel. That alone is worrisome. But, as history teaches us, the costs of appeasement are far-reaching. Those who are untroubled by Hezbollah’s murders of Jews in Bulgaria or Cyprus may soon find that the vipers they seek to ignore will one day bite them too.

Or to paraphrase Chamberlain's successor as prime minister, Winston Churchill: Europe has a choice between terrorism and shame. Choosing shame, it is likely to get terrorism too.

26-Mar-13: Hezbollah is declared "terrorist group" by Bahrain's parliament

Objects of adoration: Syrian holds poster with portraits
of Syrian president/tyrant Bashar al-Assad
and Hezbollah chief Nasrallah during pro-Assad rally
Damascus January 11, 2012 [Image Source]

, 

Benjamin Weinthal, writing in the Jerusalem Post, today:

Bahrain’s Parliament declares Hezbollah a terrorist group | March 26, 2013 | Bahrain’s lawmakers voted on Tuesday to label the Lebanese militia a terrorist organization, the Lebanon-based news outlet Now Lebanon reported. Tensions have been high since Bahrain accused Hezbollah of seeking to overthrow its government in 2011. According to a report sent to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2011, the ruling Sunni Khalifa family asserted that Hezbollah trained insurgents in Lebanon and the Islamic Republic of Iran to topple its government. The move to designate Hezbollah a terror entity comes on the heels of EU talks about banning Hezbollah within the 27-member body because of terror operations. Last week, a Cyprus criminal court convicted a Hezbollah member for plotting to kill Israeli tourists on the small Island. In addition to the foiled Cyprus plot, Bulgaria’s interior minister issued a report last month asserting  two Hezbollah operatives participated in the terror attack on an Israeli tour bus in the Black Sea resort of Burgas. The bombing in Burgas resulted in the deaths of five Israelis, their Bulgarian bus driver, and severe injuries to 32 Israelis.
Major EU countries Germany and France have resisted including Hezbollah in the EU terror list because of insufficient legal evidence. JTA reported on Friday that Karl-Matthias Klause, the spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, said “Our position is that we've always said that if we have proof that holds up in court, we can enter the procedure. There is a general readiness into looking into forbidding the military wing of Hezbollah.”
It is unclear if the legal verdict in Cyprus will influence a change in the German and French positions opposing a ban. The Netherlands is the only EU country to designate Hezbollah’s entire organization a terrorist group. The United Kingdom classifies Hezbollah’s military wing a terrorist   organization. Proponents of a ban of Hezbollah  argue a terrorist listing would freeze Hezbollah’s capability to fund-raise and procure weapons in Europe, as well as mount new terror attacks on European soil.
Germany has a large contingent of Hezbollah operatives. According to the country’s domestic intelligence agency, 950 Hezbollah members operate legally in the Federal Republic.

The Times of Israel, quoting Israel Radio, says tonight that Bahraini legislators called on the other Persian Gulf states to do the same. The US and Israel have been pressing Europe's governments to outlaw Hezbollah as a terrorist group. President Obama repeated the call here last week during his visit to Israel. Hezbollah gets its backing from two major sources: the government of Syria and the government of Iran.

There's some sharp and useful background in a recent New Yorker magazine profile entitled "AFTER SYRIA: If the Assad regime falls, can Hezbollah survive?", by Dexter Filkins. He writes:

In an Arab world dominated by Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah agitates on behalf of Shiite identity—forming, along with Syria and Iran, a column of resistance sometimes called the Shiite Axis. With Syrian and Iranian help, Hezbollah has become the most powerful force in Lebanon. Too strong to be challenged even by the government, it has set up its own mini-state and built one of the world’s most sophisticated guerrilla armies. It has kept up a relentless campaign to confront Israel, even provoking a war in 2006... [But] the issue of Hezbollah’s role inside Syria raises fundamental questions about its identity and purpose. Is it really a “resistance” organization, dedicated only to fighting Israel? Siding with the Assad government has already left Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah alone in the Arab world.

Seems like a good time to remind readers of these earlier posts:

• 29-Jan-13: What their view on Hezbollah tells us about Europe's counter-terrorism strategy
• 9-Feb-13: Hezbollah and Europe: Decisions need to be made as if people's lives were on the line
• 5-Feb-13: Now that the Bulgarians have fingered Hezbollah, what happens next in Europe? 

21-Mar-13: First conviction of Hezbollah terrorist in a European court

Larnaca International Airport is a popular
Arkia Israel Airlines destination in Cyprus;
interesting to Hezbollah as well

Keep in mind as you read the following that (as we have pointed out here numerous times) the Hizbollah terrorist group is not yet outlawed in Eruope.

Jerusalem Post's European correspondent Benjamin Weinthal filed this report about 90 minutes ago:

Cyprus criminal court convicts Hezbollah member  | BERLIN- A criminal court on Thursday  in the city of Limassol convicted Hossam Taleb Yaacoub of membership in a criminal organization. The dual Swedish-Lebanese citizen admitted last month that he was a membership of Hezbollah and engaged in surveillance of Israeli tourists. His conviction is the first time that a Hezbollah member has been found guilty of criminal activity with respect to the targeting of Israeli citizens in a European court... Cyprus reduced the charges against Yaacoub from terrorism charges to criminal charges last year... The court is slated to sentence him on March 28. Hezbollah is not listed a terror organization within the EU. Yaacoub admitted that Hezbollah's job was to observes Jews across the globe and he watched Israeli flights land in Cyprus. A few weeks after his activities, two alleged Hezbollah operatives engaged in similar activity and participated in the bombing of an Israeli tour bus in the Black Sea resort of Burgas.

A UPI report a month ago noted that his trial received

little public attention, but a conviction could put pressure on the European Union to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization... Yaacoub admitted he scouted locations Israelis would patronize, in the service of the militant group Hezbollah [but] that he had not taken part in plots to target Israeli tourists visiting Cyprus... "I'm only trained to defend Lebanon," he said... Yaacoub admitted in court he had been a Hezbollah member since 2007... [UPI]

The limited attention paid in the media to this trial of a self-confessed Hezbollah operative has been, in significant ways, a lost opportunity. As a revealing article ["The Perks of Working for Hezbollah"] in The Atlantic Wire pointed out a few weeks back, it has actually provided a rare window into the inner workings of a global terror organization:

Though he described himself as "an active member of Hezbollah," Yaacoub didn't even know the faces of the men he reported to. "In general, the party is based on secrecy between members," he told the Cyprus court. "We don't know the real names of our fellow members."
If that's a drawback, there are at least a few advantages to doing the bidding of would-be terrorists. Yaacoub said that he was paid $600 a month since 2010 for doing relatively simple tasks, like carrying discrete packages between European cities, taking trips to exotic locales like Dubai or recording the activities of buses that carry Israeli tourists. (The latter assignment is of particular interest to the court.) Yaacoub said that he was also asked to buy SIM cards discretely so that he and his fellow operatives could communicate with their Hezbollah bosses and to record arrival times of flights from Israel. In case anything went wrong along the way, Hezbollah had trained Yaacoub how to use RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, the PK machine gun and the AK-47.
Regardless of the motives of all these other activities, the young operative maintained that he didn't actually have to commit any acts of violence. "If I was asked to participate in attacks, I had the right to refuse." Not that he necessarily would. "I work for my party," Yaacoub added. "Whenever they asked me to do something, I delivered."

If parliamentarians and law enforcement leaders in Europe are not paying attention, or - worse- choosing to ignore it because of the political implications of these admissions then they ought to be ashamed of themselves. People are certainly going to die because of European indulgence of the Hezbollah terror machine.

18-Oct-12: Cyprus says it stopped a terror attack on Israelis

Limassol by night: Terror target [Image Source: Wikipedia]  

Ynet and Times of Israel are both reporting this evening on revelations made in the Cypriot newspaper Alithia saying that the Cyprus secret service has thwarted a terror attack against Israelis in Limassol. Ynet says this happened at Limassol Airport but from checking the online version of the Alithia story (it's here) we think Ynet's editors seem to have misunderstood. Limassol is a major sea port; it has no airport. 

One hundred grams of explosives were found somewhere in the port, intended, as the report suggests, to target Israeli tourists visiting Cyprus as passengers on cruise ships. The attempted attack has not been reported in any other Cypriot news media outlets, and Kol Yisrael's news (state radio) this evening says Israeli government sources say they are not aware of the plot. No information at this stage about whether any suspects have been arrested.

Ynet reminds us that in September, Israel's Counter Terrorism Bureau asked security and government authorities in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Thailand to step up visible and undercover security around Israeli tourists. 

Also worth noting that a Lebanese, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, was arrested in Limassol three months ago, and charged with terrorism offences that involved tracking the movements and planned arrival times of Israeli tourists. He was in court just this past Friday (under tight security, it may not surprise you to know) and pleaded not guilty [source]. His trial should have gotten underway in September, but was delayed.

Something's happening there because the original 17 charges have been reduced to eight and it's no longer terrorism but conspiracy to commit a crime and membership of an unnamed criminal organisation. He remains in custody until his next hearing a week from today. AFP says "Cyprus police have refused to comment publicly on the case, describing it as a “sensitive political issue” but did say investigators have found no evidence to suggest he had any accomplices" whatever that means.

Additional background in these earlier blog posts of ours

• 21-Jul-12: How involved in terror against Israelis and Jews are the Iranians?
• 14-Jul-12: Terror attack in Cyprus foiled; the targets seem to have been Israelis

14-Jul-12: Terror attack in Cyprus foiled; the targets seem to have been Israelis

Cyprus: Police in action [Image Source]

In January 2012, a Lebanese man called Hussein Idris, holding a Swedish passport, was arrested together with a second Lebanese in Bangkok. Thai police charged them with plotting to explode several bombs in the Thai capital. The target (surprise, surprise): Israelis. Associated Press quoted the head of the Thai police saying the terrorists were "pro-Iranian Hezbollah militants". 

Today (Saturday) in Cyprus, the local police revealed that they arrested a Lebanese holding a Swedish passport some days ago. [But let's note that in Lebanon, they are saying tonight that the suspect's second passport was Saudi, not Swedish.]

This Swedish/Saudi Lebanese is a 24 year old man. The police in Cyprus say he had been tracking Israeli tourists on the island, and was evidently planning attack on buses according to a local news source quoted by the Jerusalem Post. No charges have been formally laid yet in this unfolding story, but in the words of the Cypriot police: "We can confirm the arrest of a 24-year-old foreign national for specific, serious offenses, and who is in custody by order of the court." On the other hand, "It is not clear what, or whether there was a target in Cyprus. That is under investigation," a senior government official told Reuters. AFP is more forthright, quoting a police source who said he could not deny or confirm the reports because it was a "sensitive political issue"... It did however say, basing itself on a Cypriot newspaper, Phileleftheros, that the terrorists were aiming at either buses or aircraft and that "notes with details of Israeli aircraft were found" in the possession of the arrested man.

The SigmaLive news site from Cyprus is connecting the suspect with Hizbollah. But there are few details. So we'll keep watching.

Is there a connection with Iran in this sordid story? Maybe. Associated Press is quoting Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu tonight saying that Iran's hand is behind the affair. AP's report says "Netanyahu provided no proof to support his allegations..."

Let's recall the last major terror incident on the island of Cyprus. That was when a car bomb attack was mounted against the Israeli embassy in the capital, Nicosia, in May 1988 [report here]. The driver of a Mitsubishi sedan, loaded with 300 pounds of dynamite, tried to park outside the four-story Israeli embassy building but was told by guards he had to move on. Asked to identify himself, he instead drove off rapidly and crashed into another car some 200 meters away,  and the car exploded seconds later, killing the driver (named as Kaddour Gaonajan, 24) and two innocent Cypriots; seventeen others were injured. The vehicle's owner was Omar Ahmad Hawillo, also described then as a Lebanese. He escaped from the vehicle just before it exploded and was soon arrested. Convicted later that year, he confessed to being a member of the Palestinian Arab Abu Nidal terrorist group [source] that had carried out the September 1986 terrorist attack on the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, that killed twenty-two. He was sentenced by a Cypriot court to fifteen years in prison, but served only eight years after a series of presidential pardons [see this 1996 Cypriot news report].