Brazil
Police made arrests on Wednesday for allegedly conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks against Jewish communities in Brazil
Brazilian federal police have arrested two men with suspected links to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah who were allegedly planning terrorist attacks against the Jewish community in Brazil.
The arrests came Wednesday as part of an operation that police described as “disrupting preparations for terrorist attacks and obtaining evidence of the possible recruitment of Brazilians to commit extremist acts.”
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A man was arrested at Brazil’s largest international airport in Guarulhos, São Paulo, after flying in from Lebanon, media reports said. “The federal police assume that he brought with him information about how the attacks were carried out, which he was able to pass on to his partner,” reported the television station CNN Brasil.
Rio newspaper O Globo said investigators believed “the group was planning attacks on buildings belonging to Brazil’s Jewish community, including synagogues,” although no specific targets were named.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office thanked Brazilian security services “for the arrest of a terrorist cell operated by Hezbollah to carry out an attack on Israeli and Jewish targets in Brazil.”
Netanyahu’s office noted that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and other foreign security agencies played a role in the operation. She said she “thwarted a terrorist attack in Brazil that was planned by the Hezbollah terrorist organization and directed and financed by Iran… This was an extensive network operating in additional countries.”
Brazil is home to Latin America’s second-largest Jewish community, as well as a 17th-century synagogue said to be the first in the Americas.
According to multiple reports, the arrested men had ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist militia group.
Police said they had issued search warrants in three regions: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and the federal district around Brazil’s capital Brasília.
“The recruiters and those they recruit are charged with one count of forming or belonging to a terrorist organization and preparing acts of terrorism, which carries a possible maximum sentence… of 15.5 years in prison,” one said Police statement.
Founded by radical Shiite clerics after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah is now both a powerful political movement and a militant group with a global presence, including in South America. The US considers the group – which has been called a “pioneer of mass suicide attacks” – a foreign terrorist organization, while the UK considers it a banned international terrorist group.
Previous terrorist attacks attributed to Hezbollah include suicide attacks on U.S. and French troops and on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon in 1983, which killed more than 300 soldiers and civilians.
Hezbollah was also blamed for the bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires in March 1992. This attack killed 29 people and was carried out by a suicide bomber named Muhammad Nur al-Din, a Lebanese citizen who had originally emigrated to Brazil. The bombing was reportedly planned in the tri-border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
Two years later, Argentina’s Jewish community suffered an even harder blow when 86 people were killed in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center. The New York Times called the attack “one of the deadliest anti-Semitic crimes since World War II.”
According to a report from the same newspaper last year, a subsequent Mossad investigation concluded that the two attacks in Argentina were carried out by a secret Hezbollah unit in retaliation for Israeli operations against the group, including the assassination of its leader Abbas Musawi Year 1992. The explosives used in the Buenos Aires attacks were reportedly smuggled into the South American country hidden in shampoo bottles and chocolate boxes on flights from Europe.
There are several large Jewish communities in Latin America, the largest of which is in Argentina, where an estimated 180,000 Jews live. About 100,000 Jews live in Brazil, most of them in Rio and São Paulo and 40,000 in Mexico.
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