As Bulgaria marks anniversary of airport attack, call for EU to designate Hezbollah terrorist organisation
The embassy of Israel held a wreath-laying ceremony on July 17 at Bourgas Airport, on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attack in which five Israelis and a Bulgarian died and 38 people were seriously injured.
The ceremony commemorated Amir Menashe, Elior Price, Itzik Kolangi, Kohava Shriki, Maor Harush and Mustafa Kyosov, the driver of the bus that was to have taken an Israeli tourist group to a Bulgarian Black Sea resort.
In the terrorist attack, the bomb-bearer also died.
An international investigation led by Bulgaria found that the military wing of Hezbollah was behind the terrorist attack.
Those accused in the terrorist attack on the group of Israeli tourists on July 18 2012 are Meliad Farah, holder of Australian and Lebanese citizenship, and Hassan El Hajj Hassan, a Canadian passport-holder, who face terrorism and document fraud charges in connection with their assistance of bomb-bearer Mohamad Hassan El-Husseini. Farah and Hassan are the subject of international arrest warrants and are being tried in absentia.
The first hearing in the trial, on procedural matters, was held on December 19 2017, after nine false starts dating back to September 2016. The first hearing on the merits of the case was held on January 17 2018.
Meanwhile, the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute (TAI) and the Transatlantic Friends of Israel (TFI) have launched a transatlantic declaration backed by 235 legislators from North America, Israel, and Europe rejecting what the declaration calls Europe’s fictional distinction between Hezbollah’s so-called military and political arms.
Linked to the anniversaries of Hezbollah’s deadly bomb attacks in Argentina in 1994 and Bulgaria in 2012, the legislators – from different parties within the political spectrum – are urging the EU to list Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organisation.
(Photo via the Facebook page of the embassy of the State of Israel in Bulgaria)
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