Bulgaria Blast Probe Eyes Calls From Lebanon
Israel has evidence of many telephone calls between Lebanon and Burgas in the two months before the bombing that killed six people, the New York Times reported.
The volume of calls intensified in the three days before the attack on a bus carrying Israeli tourists, the newspaper reported Thursday, citing an unnamed senior government official, pointing the finger even more directly – in Israel’s eyes – at the terror group Hezbollah.
“We know the sources in Lebanon,” though not the identity of those on the other end in Bulgaria, the official told the Times.
Israel placed the blame for the July 18 attack on both Iran and Hezbollah. The U.S. and Bulgaria reportedly agree with the assessment, but have not said so officially.
The Bulgarian investigation has “largely stalled,” according to the New York Times. The attacker and his accomplices have not yet been identified. Bulgarian officials are hesitant to declare Hezbollah responsible without hard evidence, according to the newspaper.
An unnamed senior security official in Germany was quoted as saying that the European allies are skeptical that Hezbollah was responsible for the attack, speculating that Iran used “individuals with Hezbollah affiliation.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO