JERUSALEM: Israel’s Shin Bet security service yesterday announced the arrest on September 11 of an Iranian “spy” carrying photographs of the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
The suspect, holding a Belgian passport, was sent to Israel by Iran’s elite Republican Guards and arrested at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion international airport, Shin Bet charged in a statement.
The domestic intelligence service identified him as Ali Mansouri, 58, and said he had enrolled in a “special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for numerous terrorist attacks around the world”.
He had been using the fake identity Alex Mans after being recruited last year, the agency said, naming his four alleged handlers as senior Iranian officials.
The Shin Bet said that under questioning, the suspect had said he had been promised $1m to use his position as a businessman to set up companies in Israel on behalf of the Iranian intelligence services to “harm Israeli and Western interests”.
He had previously visited Israel in July 2012 and last January. An Iranian national, the suspect had in 2006 married a Belgian woman whom he had since divorced.
Belga news agency quoted Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders as saying yesterday there was nothing to indicate the suspect had acquired Belgian nationality in an irregular manner.
Vandals arrested
Police yesterday caught four young Israelis red-handed as they vandalised Christian tombstones in a cemetery in the holy city of Jerusalem, a spokesman said.
“Four Israeli Jews aged between 17 and 26, including two from settlements in the West Bank, were arrested as they broke tombstones in a Christian cemetery on Mount Sion,” Micky Rosenfeld said.
He said 15 tombstones were vandalised in the graveyard.
Rosenfeld said police were pursuing two lines of inquiry — that the attack was “a criminal incident motivated by nationalism” or that it was a “hate crime”.
In July, two suspects were arrested after vandals set fire to the door of a Trappist monastery in Latrun, 15 kilometres from Jerusalem, in September last year.
Extremists from settler and far-right groups often commit hate crimes against Palestinian and Israeli Arab villages. Muslim and Christian sites, Israeli pacifists and even the military have been targeted in reprisal for government decisions deemed hostile to their interests.
AFP
