Threatening Spain
Michael Young | December 25, 2007, 1:12pm
Over at the Across the Bay blog, Tony Bey is following the details of an interesting story picked up by the wire services.
A Spanish police memo evidently leaked to the Spanish daily El Mundo says that the head of Syrian military intelligence, Assef Shawkat (who is also the brother in law of Syrian President Bashar Assad), threatened Spain (and, by inference, Spanish troops in southern Lebanon) if a Syrian arms dealer living in Spain, Munzer al-Kassar, was extradited to the United States. (The original Spanish article is here.)
According to an AFP story: "General Assef Shawkat [...] wrote to his opposite number in Spain: 'If you think we are going to ignore the affront inflicted by north-American henchmen on our brother (Kassar), you don't really know us and [you] are no friends of the Syrian people.'"
More alarming was the information that Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, had assured the Syrians that Kassar would not be extradited. Moratinos has long tried to maintain good ties with Damascus, to the extent that he refused to even privately admit that Syria had played a role in the bomb attack against the Spanish contingent of the United Nations force in Lebanon last June that killed six peacekeepers. At the time, U.N. officials were privately saying the exact opposite, noting that there was anger with Syria at the U.N. because of the attack.
Knowing this, you have to wonder if the memo was leaked to negate Moratinos' promise.
ajacksonian | December 25, 2007, 7:23pm | #
This is the same Monzer al-Kassar that:
1) Was involved in the Iran/Contra arms for hostages deal,
2) Involved in the BNL/BCCI scandal,
3) Is the head of the al-Kassar family, which controls the heroin supply going through the Bekaa,
4) Worked out a nuclear power plant and long range missile deal between Hafez Assad and Carlos Menem before Menem won an election in Argentina,
5) Was involved in the Achille Lauro hijacking,
6) Ran his own system of agents in Argentina and made contacts with the Cali and Medellin cartels,
7) Paid for the truck and explosives in the Israeli Embassy bombing in Argentina in 1992,
8) Brought in Imad Mugniyah to create a Hezbollah Network in Argentina and blow up the AMIA Jewish cultural exchange center,
9) Ran weapons, including SAMs to FARC,
10) Shipped arms for Iran to Bosnia from Poland and Argentina, while the Balkans were under UN embargo,
11) Shipped arms to Somalia that was under UN embargo,
12) That had one witness in a Brazilian jail murdered, another witness in Marbella get drunk and 'accidentally' fall out of his apartment and a third recant in Spanish jail as Kassar was under piracy charges for the Achille Lauro in Spain... he was not prosecuted,
13) Worked with Semion Mogilevich out of Marbella, Spain,
14) Met with Osama bin Laden and used that contact to sink the Imperial Company, so that Kassar could get an Argentine gold mine,
There is more on the man... lots more...
Syria is not *joking*: the al-Kassar family has a ton of weight as it runs training camps that have pulled in folks from ETA, IRA, PLO, FARC, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, LTTE, Japanese Red Army, Shining Path...
al-Kassar has reach into the US and Canada via the family heroin rings and the extended rings via S. American drug cartels and kingpins. Mugniyah set up a group of cells from Toronto to North Carolina for various activities, mostly income generation from smuggling, gray market goods, and bank fraud.
No, Syria is deadly serious on this one... those connections to ETA are no joke, nor are Kassars to GIA and GSPC which did the Madrid bombing, which he is implicated in, also.
