Hizbullah Fighter Reportedly Escaped to Israel in June, Party Denies Arresting New Spies
A Hizbullah member escaped to Israel last June after the Shiite party’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah unveiled that the group had captured three spies among its members, two of whom were allegedly recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, An Nahar daily reported Friday.
Nasrallah said at the time that CIA members at the U.S. embassy had recruited at least two Hizbullah members and the group was investigating whether the intelligence agency or another foreign agency recruited a third.
On Thursday, Hizbullah denied media reports about the arrest of new members on charges of spying for the Mossad and said a man named Abou Abed Salim has never been a party official.
But An Nahar quoted informed sources as saying that the third member of the spying network that Nasrallah had talked about is Salim who escaped to Israel a few days after the Hizbullah leader’s speech.
Media reports said Thursday that five Hizbullah members had escaped to the Jewish state.
A party member told the newspaper that Salim had participated in the battles between Hizbullah and Amal Movement in Iqlim al-Tuffah in 1990 and had successfully targeted a top Amal official in the southern town of Baysariyyeh with an explosive device. The movement had at the time arrested his accomplices but he managed to escape.
An Nahar’s report came as informed sources told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat that Hizbullah had arrested four of its members on charges of spying while a fifth had escaped.
Other sources said that a top Hizbullah official had gone missing “for allegedly collaborating with the Mossad.”
The man who was identified by his initials as M.S. was allegedly a top official in Hizbullah’s military operations and was questioned in April 2010 by the U.N. commission investigating ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination.
The sources said the man’s parents and wife don’t know his whereabouts since he disappeared from the family home in the Ghobeiri district of Beirut’s southern suburbs.
According to rumors, the man is an Israeli spy and was involved in the assassination of Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyeh. Other rumors say that the party distanced him for unknown reasons.
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