Europol Finds Links Between Hezbollah and Bulgaria Bombing
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
The European Union’s police body, Europol, said in a report that “indications suggest possible links” between Hezbollah and a deadly terrorist attack in Bulgaria last year.
The statement, published Friday by the news site EuObserver, suggests Europol has adopted the findings of a six-month-long investigation by Bulgarian security services into the July 19, 2012 bombing of a bus of Israeli tourists in Burgas that left five Israelis and a Bulgarian dead and dozens wounded. In February, a Bulgarian minister said the attack was carried out by agents of Hezbollah’s military wing with funding provided by the Shiite group.
The Bulgarian probe led to renewed calls for the European Union to join the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in classifying Hezbollah as a terrorist group. According to various insider accounts, some EU countries including Germany and France are reluctant to take this step because it may harm their relations with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is part of the government.
In the framework of the ongoing investigation of the bombing by Bulgarian authorities, forensics and explosives experts blew up a model of the bus at Burgas airport in an attempt to recreate and better understand the attack.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
