U.S. Charges Three With Exporting Drone Parts To Lebanon's Hezbollah

17 February 2018

Various Agencies

Federal authorities have charged three men with illegally exporting drone parts and other material from the United States to Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.

It said in a statement that suspects Usama Darwich Hamade and Issam Darwich Hamade were in custody in South Africa while Samir Ahmed Berro remained at large.

According to the indictment, the trio conspired and attempted to export goods including inertial measurement units suitable for use in drones, a jet engine, piston engines and recording binoculars to Hezbollah in Lebanon from 2009 to 2013, the statement said.

Hezbollah is a heavily armed Shi'ite movement which is part of the Lebanese coalition government and backed by Iran. The United States regards it as a terrorist group.

US and Argentina to work together against Hezbollah

The United States and Argentina are to work together more closely to cut off Lebanese Hezbollah's funding networks in Latin America, both nations' top diplomats said Sunday.

Argentina has a large Lebanese expatriate population and US authorities suspect groups within it of raising funds through organized crime to support the Iranian-backed armed movement.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Buenos Aires for talks with his Argentinian counterpart Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie, and afterwards they confirmed that the issue had come up.

'With respect to Hezbollah, we also did speak today in our discussion about all of the region about how we must all jointly go after these transnational criminal organizations -- narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, smuggling, money laundering -- because we see the connections to terrorist financing organizations as well,' Tillerson said.

'And we did specifically discuss the presence of Lebanese Hezbollah in this hemisphere, which is raising funds, obviously, to support its terrorist activities.

'So it is something that we jointly agree we need to attack and eliminate,' Tillerson said.

Faurie, standing by Tillerson's side at a joint news conference, agreed, saying that South America had become a 'zone of peace' and that outside groups must not be allowed to jeopardize this.

'And, as Secretary Tillerson said, we need to intensify every possible exchange not only in terms of dialogue but also in terms of information on the actions of these groups which take advantage of transnational crime to foster their interests, which Argentina certainly does not agree with,' he said.

In 1992, the violence of the Middle East erupted in Argentina, when bombers attacked the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. Two years later, an attack on a Jewish community center in the city left 85 dead.

None of the bombers were ever convicted, but international investigators followed a trail that appears to link them to Hezbollah -- a group which Washington has designated a terrorist organization -- and to senior Iranian officials.

The bombings did not continue, but US experts believe that Hezbollah, working under close Iranian supervision, has built a fund-raising network in Latin America that profits from drug smuggling to fund its political and military activities.
 

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