Brazilian Police Arrest Two Hezbollah Agents Planning Attacks on Synagogues, Other Jewish Targets
One of the two men arrested is picked up at an airport in São Paulo upon his return from Lebanon.
Federal police in Brazil, aided by Israel’s Mossad agency, on Wednesday shut down what it says was a Hezbollah plot to attack Jewish targets in the country, arresting two Brazilian citizens — one of whom had just arrived back in the country from Lebanon.
In a statement, police said they dismantled a group “preparing” to carry out the attacks and attempting to recruit other Brazilians “to carry out extreme acts in the country.” Two men were arrested.
Officers executed the two arrest warrants and raided 11 addresses linked to the suspects in the states of Minas Gerais, Brasilia, and Sao Paulo. Authorities said the pair and any others arrested in the coming days could face more than 15 years in prison on the charges.
A Brazilian newspaper, Globo, reports that the group was planning to target buildings in Brazil’s Jewish community, including synagogues.
The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement that the cell is part of “an extensive network that operated in additional countries.”
“Given the backdrop of the war in Gaza against the Hamas terrorist organization, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime are continuing to operate around the world in order to attack Israeli, Jewish and Western targets,” the statement said. “The Mossad is working, and will continue to work, to thwart these efforts wherever necessary, by various methods.”
In recent years, the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists have built up an extensive network in Latin America focused on money laundering and drug trafficking to finance its overseas operations. In the early 1990s, the group bombed the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.
More recently, Hezbollah agents have been arrested after planning to hit targets in Panama, Peru, and elsewhere on the continent. Peru arrested one such Hezbollah operative in 2014 and another agent scouting targets — including the American and Israeli embassies — at Panama City three years later. In 2021, assassins tied to Hezbollah attempted to kill both American and Israeli nationals in Colombia.
Brazil’s left-wing president, Luis Ignacio Lula Da Silva has been an outspoken opponent of Israel’s war against Hamas and until now has allowed Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed fronts to quietly expand their operations in the country with little scrutiny from federal authorities.
