Buenos Aires- Argentina said it will tighten security measures on its border with Paraguay after its embassy in the United Kingdom received an anonymous tip alerting authorities to the possibility of bomb-making materials entering its northern border.
The Argentine Ministry of Security said in a statement that the letter warned a person seeking to ship ammonium nitrate from Paraguay to Argentina “for a bomb with a Jewish target.” The authorities indicated that they had launched an investigation to determine the person mentioned in the information, amid suspicions that the person concerned belonged to the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Last August, Lebanon witnessed a horrific explosion of thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate, stored for years in an improper manner in the Beirut port, and it is widely believed that Hezbollah and the Syrian regime have a relationship with it.
Hezbollah operatives are intensively active in the border triangle linking Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, where they carry out illegal deals to finance the operations of the Iranian-backed party in other regions. And US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has previously called for tightening control over the region.
Argentina has classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization since 2019, against the background of the group’s attacks that target Israeli and Jewish sites.
More than 100 people were killed in two attacks in Argentina in the 1990s. In 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was attacked by a car bomb, killing 29 people.
Two years later, a truck bomb exploded outside the AMIA Jewish community center, killing 85 people. Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America.
The current US administration placed the political and financial curtailment of Hezbollah at the forefront of its priorities, and it has achieved several successes in this regard, notably convincing its allies to declare the Lebanese party, its political and military wings, a terrorist organization.
It is expected that the Donald Trump administration will intensify its steps in this regard in the remainder of its period, which was previously warned by the Secretary-General of the party Hassan Nasrallah.
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