British authorities snuffed out a potential Hezbollah terror attack in 2015 after raiding the terror group’s stockpile of explosives, according to a June 9 report from the UK Telegraph.
The Telegraph report states that MI5 and the Metropolitan Police raided four areas in northwest London and discovered myriad ice packs containing three metric tons of ammonium nitrate, more than what was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, per the Jewish Chronicle. An unidentified 40-year-old man was also arrested during the raid but was later released.
Hezbollah’s reported terror plot was still in the process of being planned, but it is believed that the terror group was planning other terror attacks worldwide as well, as Hezbollah cells were later discovered in New York, Thailand and Cyprus. Israeli intelligence helped tip off British authorities about Hezbollah’s explosives as well as the other aforementioned plots, according to the Times of Israel.
The Telegraph report noted that the raid occurred three months after Britain signed onto the Iran nuclear deal, which the Telegraph said “raises questions about whether senior UK government figures chose not to reveal the plot in part because they were invested in keeping the Iran nuclear deal afloat.” The raid was also kept secret during the British parliament’s debate on banning Hezbollah’s political wing from the country. The British government officially banned the terror group in February.
Labour Friends of Israel Chair and Member of Parliament Joan Ryan said in a letter to Home Secretray Sajid Javid, “Without the bravery of our security forces this would have been used to target and murder Jews around the world. We now need to know urgently why the Government failed to disclose this vital information to the public and parliamentarians and resisted for more than three years my calls to ban Hezbollah in its entirety.”
In addition to terrorism, Hezbollah has been involved in transnational criminal activity, including drug trafficking in Latin America.
“Hezbollah has one goal and it shares the same goal with other radical Islamic organizations and that is to establish an Islamic state where Sharia [law] rules supreme,” American Jewish Committee Transatlantic Institute Director Daniel Schwammenthal said during an event at Wilshire Boulevard Temple School May 28.
