Israel fears Iranian terror attack on London Hit squad may be targeting athletes, Mossad claims
Israeli agents fearing an “anniversary attack” on Israel’s athletes at the Olympic Games in London are hunting Iranian-backed terrorists in Europe.
It is 40 years since Palestinian radicals crept into the Olympic village in Munich in an audacious operation that ended in the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, a German policeman and five of the eight attackers.
Now intelligence analysts in Tel Aviv fear the Iranians are back in the terrorist game in Europe and may be aiming to pull off a spectacular act of reprisal in the eye-for-an-eye war over their nuclear weapons program.
The alert sounded for the security services last week when Israeli tourists were am-bushed and killed by a bomber in the resort of Burgas in Bulgaria, the first attack of its kind in that country.
A man detonated a bomb on board a tourist coach carrying Israeli holidaymakers from the airport. A fireball erupted, killing five of them, including a pregnant woman, as well as the Bulgarian bus driver and the bomber himself.
Hours after the attack, an Israeli air force Hercules cargo plane, carrying two teams from Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and agents of its renowned intelligence service Mossad landed at the airport.
Initially, it looked as though a straightforward security lapse had allowed explosives hidden in a backpack onto the bus. It was only when Bulgarian agents rolled back the closed circuit TV footage of the terminal that one of the Mossad men sat up with a jolt. He immediately identified the bomber – not from his face but from the way he carried his heavy rucksack and gear. “Suicide bomber,” he said. The group went back to the bus and counted the fatalities again.
Five were identified as Israelis, one as Bulgarian and one as a man holding American documents. The Mossad man rushed to inform his superior in Brussels.
The urgency was not just because he had identified the culprit. This was Israel’s night-mare scenario: the appearance of “stealth terrorists,” Arabs disguised as Europeans, a development that makes detecting them far harder.
It also looked as if the perpetrator had an accomplice, who may have detonated the device by remote control, perhaps without the knowledge of the bomb-carrier. That meant live terrorists were on the loose. Bulgarian authorities later issued a sketch of a man described as an American citizen named “David Jefferson,” who, it is feared, carried another explosive device with him.
The discovery that the dead man, who has not been identified, had a forged driving licence in the name of Jacque Felipe Martin from Michigan, which is home to a large number of Arab-Americans originating in the Shiite areas of Lebanon, confirmed the alarm. Israel learned through its sources some time ago that the Quds Force, which is Iran’s overseas hit squad, was planning to use someone disguised as a westerner as a suicide bomber.
The Israelis became convinced it was part of a bigger plan – and they suspected the target was the London Games.
Within 24 hours Mossad dispatched teams from its Nev-iot or “spring” units, which use state-of-the-art telecoms monitoring systems, to several capitals in Europe. Their job was to monitor known Quds Force agents operating from Iranian embassies and safe houses.
Israeli officials now fear that Iran and Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim group it arms and funds in Lebanon and uses as a proxy, intended to repeat the terrorism spectaculars of the 1970s.
The Times, London