THE BIG ISSUE: HEZBOLLAH PLOTS
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/549823/the-big-issue-the-hezbollah-plots
Across Bangkok, there are dozens of offices, unmarked and unbillboarded, with unlisted telephone numbers and extensions, trying to reach the perfect ratio of attracting no attention whatsoever while committing maximum, preferably violent harm on a small number of human targets.
The sharp-eyed might have noticed some of those offices last week by the extremely late-burning lights.
Three and a half years ago, the men and women in those offices, helped by almost unbelievably good luck, took a series of actions that shut down plans for terrorist attacks in Bangkok and, probably, upcountry. The plans were put to sleep but now there are suspicions the planners have awakened regrouped, refreshed and restarted.
An innocuous press release by the United States Department of the Treasury has angered the highly secretive inhabitants of those Bangkok offices and hundreds like them in other world capitals.
The spooks and spies who work to prevent seriously nasty people from launching seriously bad violence believe American bureaucrats have unwittingly told some of those nasty people that anti-terrorist groups are on to them. That makes their job much harder because “the bad guys” as they are universally called now know some of what the intelligence community knows.
At the centre of all this is Hezbollah, but specifically the Lebanese born Hussein Atris. He is 50 years old and by dint of careful planning able to turn himself into a Swedish tourist when he wants. He wanted that in 2010 and 2011 when he made many trips from Europe and the Middle East to Thailand, where he stockpiled four tonnes of urea-based fertiliser and 290 litres of ammonium nitrate in what he thought was a safe house, a shophouse he rented in Samut Sakhon.
Atris was arrested at Suvarnabhumi airport in December, 2012, because of information provided from some of the secret offices. He was persuaded by interrogators to give up his safe house details. He kept repeating the lie he was not Hezbollah, lied that the explosives were to be shipped out of Thailand for terrorist attacks elsewhere, and generally said as little as possible. The Thai prison system dumped him back on the street last September after a short stay for illegal possession of explosives.
At which point Atris returned to Lebanon and hooked up with Hezbollah comrades Meliad Hussein Farah, a Lebanese with an Australian passport, and Hassan el-Hajj Hassan, a Lebanese with a Canadian passport.
Bureaucrats in the US Office of Foreign Assets Control somehow got copied on a report of this hookup, put the three men on a sanctions list barring them from doing business in the United States and published it all on the internet.
An intelligence source told the Bangkok Post Sunday this was “unbelievable” but it really isnt. “Bad guys” read the internet all the time to find out what the “good guys” know about them.
The unholy trinity of a Swede, an Australian and a Canadian can get across most borders pretty easily, as Atris demonstrated repeatedly in Thailand four and five years ago. What they’re up to now is not something the men and women in the anonymous, busy offices are going to tell a newspaper.
Atris and company, however, are believed to be linked to “The Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight”, that lucky break that prevented serious terrorist attacks around Thailand on Valentine’s Day, 2012, just after Atris’s arrest. The Iranians who accidentally detonated the bombs they hoped to use against Israeli tourists seemed incompetent to many. The now-legless bomber Saeid Moradi and one of his accomplices are enjoying free room and board for 15 years or less at the Klong Prem incarceration facilities. Moradi gets around in a wheelchair purchased by Thai taxpayers.
But the bulk of that gang escaped, including the woman known from her Iranian travel documents as Leila Rohani. She was probably the mastermind, and she is as free as the Lebanese trio.
Oh, and the Canadian and Australian that the Swedish Atris is currently hanging out with? They were in the same worldwide plot as Atris as the Iranian Valentines Day gang. In 2012 they successfully bombed Israeli tourists at the Burgas, Bulgaria airport. That is the most important fact that was given away by the US bureaucracy while the spooks and spies were all trying to keep it secret.
The Bulgaria attack was a suicide bombing that killed five Israelis and a Bulgarian tour bus driver, and wounded 32 tourists. The Bulgarian interior minister said shortly after the attack it was organised, supplied and backed up by two men who had Canadian and Australian passports and lived in Lebanon.
What a coincidence, then, that the intercepted Bangkok bomb-building Atris is hanging out with the Bulgarian bombing “suspects”. And that’s why lights are burning late in many nondescript offices in Bangkok these days.
One can only hope they continue to be successful in preventing the mass killings that Hezbollah, and perhaps others, are planning for this country.
Related search: big issue, hezbollah, terrorism, alan dawson
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