Hezbollah rally in Beirut, Lebanon in 2008. Photograph by Tim Dickinson
Foreign ministers from the European Union have agreed to put the military wing of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on the EU’s terror list.
The pressure to change the Shi’ite group’s status in the EU came from the UK and Netherlands, citing evidence that they were behind the bus bombing in Bulgaria in 2012 where five Israeli tourists were killed. A Bulgarian representative to the EU claimed that the forged documents used by the bombers led back to a man with ties to Hezbollah, and and this month Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev said there was “clear evidence” linking the group to the attack. However, others have pointed to Al Qaeda as the possible group behind the attack, and no official police or intelligence investigation has proved links with Hezbollah. Hezbollah and Iran, which funds the organisation, have denied involvement in the attack.
The involvement of Hezbollah in the conflict in Syria, where they support President Assad’s regime, also helped to persuade ministers that the group should be targeted as a terrorist organisation, with a number of countries in the EU still investigating the possibility of arming the rebels in the conflict. Marking the group as a terrorist organisation enables EU member states to confiscate any assets of the organisation found within the EU.
The EU had previously resisted pressure from the US and Israel to define the group as a terrorist organisation, due to their belief that such a move could result in further instability in Lebanon where the political wing of the group shares power within government.
