Omar Suweid, Binyamin Avraham, Adi Avitan and Elhanan Tannenbaum Handed Over to Bin Laden?

The Israeli government’s failure to answer the agonizing questions posed by the missing men’s families is explained by the extremely sensitive information recently reaching the West, and reported by debkafile from its intelligence and terrorism sources: The captured Israelis are now believed to have been handed over to the Saudi billionaire terrorist Osama Bin Laden, who may be holding them in one of his secret bases in Afghanistan. There is no information about the men’s state of health or wounds. Following the kidnapping last October of the four men – three soldiers on the Lebanese border and Tannenbaum outside the country – debkafile revealed for the first time that the notorious Lebanese hostage-taker Imad Mughniyeh was behind the snatch – not the Hizballah. This now ties in with another surprising development, recently pieced together by US intelligence in the course of its investigation of the terrorist-bombing of the US Cole in Aden harbor in the same month as the kidnappings: Iranian spiritual ruler Ayatollah Khamenei’s personal security service, which is headed by Mughniyeh, has struck a deal with Bin Laden’s al Qaeda for an operational partnership against US Gulf and Middle East targets as well as Israeli and Jewish interests worldwide.
The captive Israelis are thought to be hidden in one of Bin Laden’s secret hideouts in the North Afghan region of Jowzjan, not far from the Tadjikistan frontier, where the Islamic terrorist chief recently established an underground command post heavily protected against raids by special forces and air and missile attack. In view of this information, the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder., called off his planned trip to Tehran.
debkafile‘s sources add that it was clear right from the beginning of the Israeli investigation that the kidnappers of the three soldiers patrolling the Shaaba Farms region of the Lebanese frontier were no Lebanese Shiite Hizballah guerrillas. debkafile identified the captors, who were disguised in UNIFIL uniforms, as men under the command of Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special operational and terrorist unit serving Iran’s fanatical spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and revealed that the incident was part of a long-term hostage-taking plan.
After this discovery and the capture of Elhanan Tannenbaum, the Israeli government broke off contacts through go-betweens with the Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who plainly had no hand in the affair. At that point, Israel asked the German chancellor to use his good offices with Tehran, hoping the Iranians would not spurn a request from the only Western power with whom they are on good terms. But the Germans reported that their request had fallen victim to a power struggle in Tehran between the extremist Khamenei and the more moderate president Khatami.
At first Schroeder received encouraging signals from Tehran, but those signals turned out to have come from Khatami’s faction, who was never in the picture of the kidnappings or any of Mughniyeh’s operations, and had no access to information on the kidnapped Israelis.
Two additional developments further dimmed the prospects of reaching the abducted Israelis:
A. The Khamenei-Khatami feud took a sharp turn for the worse; the spiritual leader gaining the upper hand over the president, despite the support he enjoyed from Iranian liberals and intellectuals. Khamenei exploited the president’s desire to help the Germans in their quest for information on the kidnapped Israelis as evidence he was kowtowing to foreign elements, enemies of Islam.
The Iranian President, his back to the wall, regretfully informed the German chancellor at the beginning of January he was unable to obtain the requested information.
B. In the early days of January too, the US intelligence inquiry into the sabotage of the US Cole in Aden harbor last October 10, turned up evidence of a growing intelligence and operational collaboration between Khamanei’s private security organization and the Saudi billionaire-terrorist’s Al Qaeda. Mughniyeh was once again cast in a key role – coordinator between the two organizations. The Iranian extremist ruler appears to have placed his organization at the service of Bin Laden in return for the Saudi terrorist undertaking to execute attacks on US targets in the Gulf and the Middle East. According to one report, it was Bin Laden who asked Mughniyeh to abduct American and Israeli intelligence officers and hand them over to him.
The three Israeli soldiers were abducted to trap Tannenbaum, who was indeed assigned with the mission of establishing what had become them. The three soldiers were not kept more than an hour or two in Lebanon, before being whisked out by plane or private sea craft to one of the Gulf emirates, probably the UAR. There, Mughniyeh’s men waited for Tannenbaum to walk into the trap. After he too was captured, Mughniyeh and his men carried all four by sea to Iran. From that moment on, the captured Israelis’ tracks vanished.
Our intelligence sources believe that they were transferred to Osama Bin Laden.
They also maintain that the new alliance between the Mugniyeh outfit and the Saudi terrorist is behind the widely-broadcast US warning to Americans in the last week, diplomats in particular, to take precautions against terrorist attacks. The information reaching the United States is that the notorious Beirut hostage-taker of the eighties is back on the warpath, preparing an abduction campaign against US and Israeli intelligence operatives on behalf of his Saudi ally.