Members of Israeli spy ring \'related to 9/11 hijacker\'

Tag : ring
The army said that the men had been arrested on Friday, but thesource said that they were actually captured two weeks ago and thediscovery of the arrests by the media prompted the army to announcetheir capture.
The army said the men had admitted "gathering information onpolitical party offices and monitoring the movements of partyfigures for the enemy."
The statement added that the men had been found with"communications devices and other sophisticated equipment," whichthey used to gather information and transmit it to Mossad agents.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the source said the men arerelatives of Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese who helped commandeer United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed into a Pennsylvaniafield on September 11, 2001, killing everyone on board. Jarrah'sfamily is from the town of Al-Marej in the Bekaa Valley, where thearrests took place.
The Jarrah family have repeatedly denied that Ziad was part of theSeptember 11 plot, claiming he was instead a innocent passenger onthe plane, but an official investigation concluded that he was asenior member of the hijacking team who had undergone flighttraining in order to carry out the attacks.
Residents of Al-Marej told As-Safir newspaper that the men werearrested when security forces raided a home in the town and seizedequipment from a car. The newspaper said investigators had founddocuments which prove that the men had been in contact with Israeliintelligence agents. Investigators said that the men had passedinformation about the location of Lebanese and Syrian army outpoststo the Israelis.
One of the two men arrested, identified only by his initials"A.D.J.," is believed to have been the head of the spy ring.Security sources told The Daily Star that the man was a member ofthe Palestinian militant group Fatah al-Intifadah, which is knownto be active along the Syrian border.
The other man who was arrested is said to be a relative of "A.D.J."and was allegedly involved in conducting reconnaissance work forMossad in the Bekaa Valley.
Investigators said that the spy ring had been active in the areasince the late 1980s.
Retired General Elias Hanna told The Daily Star that Lebanonprovided the perfect environment for spies to operate. "Lebanon isan open theater for espionage and counter-espionage," he said. "Ithas all the elements that are needed in international and regionalconflict."
But he said that if the group had been operating since the 1980s itwould be surprising. "That's 20 years," he said. "That's a longperiod of time."
The timing of the arrests was also surprising, he said, given thatsenior officials in the Lebanese Army had recently been replaced,disrupting the continuity needed for counter-espionage operations.
"You have to work on these cases for a long period of time. Itrequires information and long periods of monitoring," Hanna said.
"The previous period was chaotic in Lebanon, so I don't know howthe arrests happened," he added.
He said the group were probably trying to gather information aboutHizbullah, but would not have been able to infiltrate the group."Hizbullah is an intelligence-proof entity," he said. "It operateswith a very high level of secrecy. If you cannot get inside it, youstudy its environment. This is what we are seeing."
Investigators say the men were tasked with monitoring the movementsof senior political figures in the Bekaa region, which lies on themain route between Beirut and Damascus.
Officials are also investigating a theory that the group providedintelligence to the Israelis that may have helped them plan thekilling of the senior Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyehin Damascus in February.
Hizbullah's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has accused Israel ofbeing behind the car bomb that killed Mughniyeh and has pledgedthat the Shiite group will take revenge for his death.
An Israeli government spokesman refused to comment on the arrests.
"Every couple of weeks there is someone, somewhere accusing theMossad of something. As a rule, we don't comment on all theseaccusations," the spokesman said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Army denied the validity of media reportsthat linked two men seen crossing the Lebanese-Israeli border onSunday with the case. In a statement issued on Sunday, the armysaid that the reports were "confused."