An exploding car door detonated by an Israeli plane over Lebanon is suspected of killing the brothers Mahmoud and Nidal Mahjub in Sidon May 26

This is one of the disclosures emerging from Lebanon’s break-up of two alleged Israeli sabotage-spy rings held responsible for the targeted assassination of the brothers, who were Hizballah coordinators with West Bank suicide bomb controllers, and a string of Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist activists in Lebanon. Two Israeli agents reportedly flew into Beirut international airport by commercial flight on false passports three days before the operation. They are believed to have headed for Sidon, replaced a door of the Mahjub brothers’ car with the booby-trapped facsimile. They are said to have flown out again after an Israeli plane over Sidon detonated the planted explosives with an electronic beam.
In a complaint to be lodged with the UN Security Council, Lebanon will accuse Israel of acts of sabotage and violations of its territory. In addition to overflights, Israel will be charged with landing naval commandos on the Lebanese coast to deliver bomb-making materials, electronic and surveillance devices to ring members.
Lebanese defense minister Elias Murr reported that in a raid of a house in Sidon, security forces discovered a device for flashing to Israeli planes the coordinates for locating targets rigged for explosion, as well communications, surveillance and bomb-making equipment.
When he was captured, the ringleader of one network, Mahmoud Rafeh, a Druze from Hasbaiah in South Lebanon, made a full confession without waiting to be pressed. He led the investigators to the Sidon hideout where his ring had rigged the car door. Rafeh, in his fifties, claimed to have been enlisted in 1989 by Meir Dagan, today director of the Mossad, and described the unusual functions of his network as a logistics-cum-information center, which laid the groundwork for Israeli operations against targeted terrorist operatives. Lebanese agents were never informed of the targets, just ordered to leaving the means of destruction at drop points for Israeli agents to pick up – and then make off.
The Palestinian Ain Hilwa refugee camp of Sidon, Palestinian military center in Lebanon, was shocked to learn that Hussein Khattab, a Palestinian, member of Ahmed Jibril’s radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -General Command, was suspected of heading the second Israeli ring. His brother, Sheikh Jamal Khattab, is an Islamic cleric and an al Qaeda recruiting agent in Lebanon. Hussein escaped capture.
Israel will no doubt deny any of the charges leveled by Lebanon when the issue comes up at the UN Security Council.