The body of Mohammad Sarur, a Lebanese official suspected of being linked to Hezbollah, was found riddled with seven bullets in a villa near Beirut on April 9. “This crime (…) according to the data we have so far, was carried out by intelligence services,” said Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi this Sunday evening during a television interview. To a journalist from the Al-Jadeed channel who asked him if he thought it was Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, he replied “yes”.
Mohammad Sarur worked for financial institutions of the powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, according to a Lebanese security source. In August 2019, the US Treasury announced sanctions against him, accusing him of being “responsible for the transfer of tens of millions of dollars between the Revolutionary Guards of Iran”, the ideological army of the regime, “ and the Ezzeddine al-Qassam brigades”, the armed wing of Hamas, “through Hezbollah in Lebanon”.
“All the data indicates that the Mossad is behind his assassination,” a senior judicial official who requested anonymity told AFP on Monday. “The investigation is in its early stages, and is bringing together the elements, particularly telecommunications,” added this official.
“Tortured and killed”
A security official who also requested anonymity told AFP that "the Mossad used Lebanese and Syrian agents to lure Sarur to a villa in Beit Méry", on the heights of Beirut. “It was there that he was tortured and killed,” added this source, according to whom “the perpetrators of the crime used pistols equipped with silencers and erased all the fingerprints” at the crime scene. According to his family, he had disappeared six days before his body was found.
Lebanon and Israel are still in a state of war and the authorities regularly announce that they have arrested people accused of spying for their enemy. In January 2019, the Lebanese army announced that it had arrested a Mossad agent involved in an assassination attempt a year earlier on a Hamas official in southern Lebanon.
But Mossad operations in Lebanon date back more than fifty years. In April 1973, the Israeli foreign intelligence service assassinated three Palestinian officials during a spectacular attack in Beirut. Mohammed Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser, were shot dead in their homes by a commando including Ehud Barak, who later became Prime Minister, disguised as a woman.
In January 1979, another senior official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ali Hassan Salamé, was killed in the explosion of his vehicle in Beirut, attributed to the Mossad. Salamé, married at the time to the former Lebanese Miss Universe Georgina Rizk, like the three other leaders, were prosecuted for their involvement in the deaths of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972.