Lebanon: Authorities accuse Mossad of killing Hezbollah-linked man

The body of Mohammed Sarour, a Lebanese official with suspected links to Hezbollah, was found riddled with seven bullets in a villa near Beirut on April 9. “This crime (…) according to the information we have, was committed by the intelligence services,” Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said this Sunday evening during a television interview. To an Al-Jadeed journalist who asked him if he thought it was the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, he answered yes.

According to a Lebanese security source, Mohammad Sarour worked for the financial institutions of the powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas. In August 2019, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against him, accusing him of being “responsible for the transfer of tens of millions of dollars between the Islamic Revolutionary Guards,” the regime’s ideological army, “and the Ezzeddine al-Qassam Brigades.” “, the armed wing of Hamas, “through Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

“All evidence points to the Mossad being behind his murder,” a senior judicial official, who requested anonymity, told AFP on Monday. “The investigation is at an early stage and is putting all the elements together, particularly telecommunications,” the official added.

“Tortured and killed”

A security official, who also wished to remain anonymous, told AFP that “Mossad used Lebanese and Syrian agents to lure Sarour to a villa in Beit Meri”, on the heights of Beirut. “That’s where he was tortured and killed,” added the source, who said “the perpetrators of the crime used pistols equipped with silencers and wiped out all fingerprints” at the crime scene. His family said he disappeared six days before his body was found.

Lebanon and Israel are still at war, and authorities regularly announce the arrest of people accused of spying for the enemy. In January 2019, the Lebanese army announced that it had arrested a Mossad agent involved in the assassination attempt a year earlier on a Hamas official in southern Lebanon.

However, Mossad operations in Lebanon go back more than fifty years. In April 1973, Israel’s foreign intelligence service killed three Palestinian officials in a spectacular attack in Beirut. Mohammed Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser were shot dead in their homes by commandos, including Ehud Barak, who later became prime minister, disguised as a woman.

In January 1979, another senior PLO official, Ali Hassan Salameh, was killed in a car bombing in Beirut attributed to the Mossad. Salameh, who was married at the time to former Lebanese Miss Universe Georgina Rizk, was, like three other leaders, prosecuted for his involvement in the deaths of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972.