Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah has admitted that Sami Hani Shehab who was arrested in Egypt was a Hizbullah agent and was involved in a large weapons smuggling cell that was helping to arm Hamas in Gaza. An Egyptian prosecutor charged that Nasrallah ordered the cell to stage terrorist attacks in Egypt.
Nasrallah stated, "If aiding the Palestinians is a crime, then I am guilty and proud of it," but he denied that the terrorist network has a branch in Egypt or elsewhere. The London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper on Saturday quoted an unnamed Cairo official that "Nasrallah wants to turn Egypt into a playground like Lebanon." Nasrallah encouraged Egyptians last December to protest against their government and force it to open the border at Gaza.
The source added that Nasrallah's admission indicates he is "satisfying the Iranian interest to occupy the world, as [Iran] develops its nuclear program."
The Egyptian weekly al-Ahram revealed that several of the 49 suspects arrived in Egypt illegally from four different countries. It added that several of them infiltrated through tunnels from Gaza and that the real ringleader, Mohammed Kabalan, escaped the Egyptian roundup.
On Thursday, media reports said that Shehab was suspected of heading a Hezbollah unit responsible for neighboring states, and that Palestinian Authority Arabs and Sudanese were among those arrested. The Lebanese Al-Mustaqbal daily reported that several members of the cell admitted that they sent "detailed information" about the towns on the Egyptian-Palestinian borders to Hizbullah headquarters in Lebanon
The Egyptian public prosecutor's office also charged that Hizbullah, closely allied with Iran, was trying to monitor the Suez Canal.
The charges that the terrorist ring was trying to monitor the Suez Canal prompted speculation that Nasrallah's real aim was to bolder naval patrols in order to help Iran. The DEBKA website, whose reports usually are published without named sources and often are speculation, stated that Nasrallah's admission that a Hizbullah agent was involved in smuggling arms from Egypt to Gaza was a cover-up.
The website's sources said the cell's mission was to plant "an Iranian logistical-intelligence infrastructure as stealthily and inconspicuously as possible along the shores of the Suez Canal. This chain was to eventually hook up with the clandestine Iranian cells operating out of Somalia and Sudan opposite the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean and provide Iran with an outer safety belt as a counterweight to the U.S. naval presence in those waters."
The arrests of Shehab in November and the rest of the cell several weeks ago help explain the timing of the Israeli attack on a weapons convoy in Sudan that was headed for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons for Hamas. American naval forces also reportedly intercepted Iranian ships last January with arms for Hamas.
Egypt in turn often has foiled smuggling by Hamas as a response to criticism of turnging a blind eye to the terrroist group's activities. Cairo reported Saturday that its police forces last week arrested a man who was trying to smuggling $2 million in cash in to Gaza.