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'Sleeper'
cells belonging to militant Lebanese Shiite group
Hezbollah are present in Western Europe, Latin America and
in southeast Asia and been ordered to be ready to carry
out terrorist attacks should Israel prolong its military
offensive against Lebanon, according to unnamed German
intelligence sources.
A similar alarm was raised last
week by Israel's Shin Bet security service and Israeli
embassies and institutions have been put on high alert.
Hezbollah reportedly has sleeper cells in more than 20
countries, including Italy, and is alleged to have already
been involved in several spectacular attacks.
 These
include Argentina's deadliest bombing and the largest
single incident of terrorism against Jews since World War
II: the 1994 car-bomb attack on the AMIA building in the
capital Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people - most of
them Jewish - and injured over 300.
Eight days after the AMIA attack,
the Israeli Embassy in the British capital, London, was
car-bombed by two Palestinians allegedly linked to
Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has also been blamed for
an earlier suicide bomb attack in 1992 that destroyed the
Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring
242.
Hezbollah is believed by the United
States and some other countries' intelligence agencies to
have kidnapped over 30 Westerners between 1982 and 1992,
including US journalist Terry Anderson, British journalist
John McCarthy, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special
envoy, Terry Waite, and Irish citizen, Brian Keenan.
Hezbollah was accused by the US
government of being responsible for the April 1983 bombing
of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63; of being
behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, a suicide truck
bombing that killed 241 US Marines in their barracks in
Beirut in October 1983; of bombing the replacement US
Embassy in East Beirut on 20 September, 1984, killing 20
Lebanese and two US soldiers; an attack that killed 58
French soldiers in their barracks; and of carrying out the
1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to
Rome.
A Lebanese
newspaper has estimated 1,000 people have been killed in
terror attacks by Hezbollah. The group denies involvement
in any of these attacks.
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