Nasrallah Gave Green Light to Assassination Attacks in Ashoura
Confessions of the 49 people held for plotting attacks on behalf of Hizbullah have uncovered that Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave his green light to assassination attacks in his January speech on the occasion of Ashoura.
Egyptian sources close to interrogation officials said a number of detainees have confessed to receiving instructions from Nasrallah via Hizbullah official Sami Hani Shehab, also a suspect.
They said Nasrallah gave the Okay in his Ashoura speech during which he lashed out at Egypt for closing its crossing with the Palestinian enclave and called for "uprisings."
Addressing the Egyptian people, Egyptian Army officers and intellectuals, Nasrallah said back in January: "I”m not calling for a coup d”etat, but go talk to your leaders and tell them you do not accept what is happening in Gaza."
The sources told Al Mustaqbal newspaper that several detainees were not aware that the party they belong to is an expansion of Hizbullah.
They said the detainees also confessed during their interrogation to having sent "detailed information" about towns and cities on the Egyptian-Palestinian border to Hizbullah in Lebanon.
They also confessed to renting apartments overlooking the navigational course of the Suez Canal with the aim of monitoring ships and tourist areas in the northern and southern province of Sinaa as well as providing quantities of explosives and preparing bombs.
Ashraq al Awsat said it entered Shehab”s apartment in a Cairo suburb on Thursday and spoke with the landlord and neighbors who said the 39-year-old suspect would not receive guests in his home.
Egypt”s public prosecutor ordered on Thursday that the 49 detainees be kept in custody for a further 15 days, a judicial source said.
"The public prosecutor decided to detain the members of the group affiliated with Hizbullah for 15 days for questioning on suspicion of membership in a clandestine organization calling for rebellion" against the country”s leadership, the source said.
On Wednesday, a statement from the prosecutor said an investigation determined the men had been commissioned by Nasrallah to conduct attacks in Egypt.
Arrests were first made in November and the rest of the group was rounded up by the end of last month, an security official said.
On Thursday, state media reported that one of those arrested, Sami Hani Shehab, was suspected of heading a Hizbullah unit responsible for neighboring states and that Palestinians and Sudanese were among those arrested.
The suspects are also accused of espionage, forging official documents and preparing explosives.
The detention may be renewed every 15 days for six months, when the prosecution must either charge them or release them.
Montassar el-Zayat, a lawyer for some of the defendants, said Shehab”s brother had asked him to represent him but he had not been allowed to see him or attend interrogations.
Zayat accused security of bringing politically motivated charges against the suspects.
"My impression is that it is a fabricated case created by Egyptian security in the context of bad relations between Hizbullah and Egypt. It is a pressure card," he said.
Egyptian officials accused Nasrallah of fomenting sedition and state media branded him an "Iranian agent."
Egypt, a mostly Sunni Muslim country, has accused the Shiite government of Iran and Hizbullah of conspiring to spread Shiite ideology in the region.
The general prosecutor listed "spreading Shiite ideology" as one of the aims of the detained men.
Egypt and Iran broke off relations a year after Islamist revolutionaries overthrew Iran”s pro-Western shah in 1979.
Iran opposed Cairo”s 1979 peace treaty with Israel and named a street in Tehran after the assassin of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president killed by an Egyptian Islamist militant in 1981.