Hezbollah Terror Financier Wanted by U.S. Arrested in Romania

Hezbollah Terror Financier Wanted by U.S. Arrested in Romania

Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group suffered a major blow on Friday when authorities in Romania arrested its key financier Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi. The arrest came five years after President Donald Trump’s administration labelled Bazzi a “global terrorist” and offered $10 million for his capture.

The 58-year-old Hezbollah financier is reported to have funneled millions of dollars to Hezbollah and has been linked to the global drug trade and money laundering. “Hizballah uses financiers like Bazzi who are tied to drug dealers, and who launder money to fund terrorism,” former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin,  said in 2018.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, he also “has business ties to the Ayman Joumaa Drug Trafficking and Money Laundering Organization.”

A significant arrest. Mohammad Bazzi, a #Hezbollah financier, has been the subject of @RFJ_USA for up to $10 million. https://t.co/SjusfkjxSs pic.twitter.com/PRABEW6lof

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) February 24, 2023

Lebanon-based Hezbollah was created by the Iranian regime in the 1980s as a proxy terrorist militia to carry out acts of international terrorism and wage war against Israel. Since 2011, Hezbollah has extended its field of operations into neighboring Syria. In recent years, Iran has been using Syria to supply weapons, including advanced missiles, to Hezbollah.

ABC News reported Bazzi’s arrest:

A Lebanese and Belgian citizen considered a key financier of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah was arrested Friday in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, federal authorities said.

Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, 58, who was labeled a “global terrorist” by the United States in 2018 when $10 million was offered for information about his whereabouts, has funneled millions of dollars to Hezbollah over the years, authorities said.

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in Brooklyn said the extradition of Bazzi and Lebanese citizen Talal Chahine, 78, was sought on charges contained in an indictment returned last month in Brooklyn federal court.

“Mohammad Bazzi thought that he could secretly move hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United States to Lebanon without detection by law enforcement,” Peace said in a release. “Today’s arrest proves that Bazzi was wrong.”

Charges lodged against Bazzi and Chahine included conspiracy to cause U.S. individuals to conduct unlawful transactions with a global terrorist and money laundering conspiracy. It was unclear who will represent the men when they arrive in the United States.

Daniel J. Kafafian, acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New Jersey, said the defendants “attempted to provide continued financial assistance to Hezbollah, a foreign terrorist organization responsible for death and destruction.”

Romanian law enforcement authorities took Bazzi into custody after he arrived in Bucharest on Friday, according to the release announcing his arrest.

Authorities said Bazzi and Chahine conspired to force or induce an individual in the U.S. to liquidate their interests in some real estate assets in Michigan and covertly transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars in proceeds out of the U.S. to Bazzi and Chahine in Lebanon.

President Trump’s crackdown on terrorism financing came after the Obama White House, keen to reach a nuclear deal with the Mullah regime, turned a blind eye to Hezbollah’s drug trafficking operations, including smuggling of cocaine into the U.S., news reports say.

The website Politico revealed in December 2017 that “[i]n its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.”

Politico added:

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

As Europe fails to secure its borders against mass migration, Hezbollah is expanding its drug trafficking network in that continent as well.

A 2018 study conducted by the European Union found “a large network of Lebanese nationals offering money laundering services to organized crime groups in the EU and using a share of the profits to finance terrorism-related activities of the Lebanese Hezbollah’s military wing.” The report noted that the “cooperation of these money-launderers and Hezbollah’s military wing was a clear example of a nexus between organized crime and terrorism.”

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