On Tuesday of this week the Shin Bet revealed the name of Kais Obeid, who specializes in kidnapping Israeli citizens and holding them for bargaining purposes. Why did the Shin Bet go public with this information? Did the security service understand that it had erred in its handling of the matter? Until this week the Shin Bet and the police clamped a total media blackout on the Obeid case, going to court to obtain gag orders for that purpose. Ha'aretz asked the courts on numerous occasions during the past 12 months to lift the gag order, but all its requests were rejected.
Apparently the Shin Bet reached the conclusion that the ban on publication was liable to cause more damage than publicizing the story. The concern is that Israelis are liable to be caught in the web that Kais Obeid and his handlers in Hezbollah, the militant Lebanon-based Muslim organization, are trying to weave. Their method was exposed after Obeid, an Arab citizen of Israel, disappeared in September 2000. He is thought to be living in Lebanon with his wife and children. The Shin Bet stated in response that the timing stemmed from the accumulation of recently arrived intelligence information in the wake of interrogations of suspects and from the desire not to adversely affect investigations.
Shortly after Obeid disappeared, Colonel (res.) Elhanan Tannenbaum was abducted. Tannenbaum flew out of Ben-Gurion International Airport on a plane to Brussels for a meeting in Europe in October 2000, and vanished without a trace. According to one of the initial reports in the affair, he flew from Belgium to one of the Gulf emirates, apparently Abu Dhabi. The Shin Bet and the Mossad espionage agency are inclined to believe that someone Tannenbaum knew well lured him to a business meeting in Europe. One way or another, 10 days later the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, announced that Tannenbaum was in the hands of his organization. At the family's request, the police and the Shin Bet obtained gag orders on this episode, too. The Shin Bet says that in the initial stage after Tannenbaum's abduction, the information was not certain and therefore no public warning was issued.
The Shin Bet suspects that Obeid and Hezbollah were planning to lure additional Israelis and repeat the success of the Tannenbaum abduction. On Wednesday, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported in its lead story that Hezbollah planned to abduct a former Israeli energy minister, Gonen Segev, who has been involved in private business since leaving the government in 1995. At the start of his business career, Segev tried to form ties in the Persian Gulf and become involved in a plan to import natural gas from Qatar. Segev said in reaction that the Shin Bet warned him a year ago that there was a scheme afoot to abduct him. He said that in the past few years he has had no business ties in the Arab world. According to security sources, the warning given to Segev had nothing to do with Hezbollah.
Kais Obeid's name also came up in the trial of Nissim (his surname may not be published), a resident of Holon, south of Tel Aviv, who immigrated to Israel from Lebanon 10 years ago and is accused of spying for Hezbollah. His handler in Hezbollah was in contact with him in the past two years, and one of his assignments was to try to lure one of his relatives, who is an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, to visit Europe.
Obeid, who is in his early thirties, is the youngest son of a well-known family from Taibeh. (The family is also known by the surname of Abdul Kadar.) In the 1960s, Obeid's grandfather, Diab Obeid, was a Knesset member on the Arab List, which was affiliated with the ruling party, Mapai, the forerunner of today's Labor Party. His father, Hassan, was deputy head of the Taibeh local council in the 1980s. Both the father and the grandfather had good connections with the Israeli political establishment. Obeid's four brothers are all engaged in respectable professions: one is a physician in Germany, Mohammed is the director of the Bank Hapoalim branch in Taibeh, Kamal owns a household goods store in Taibeh and Akram also owns a business. Their younger sister, Mona, is a master's student at Bar-Ilan University and in charge of the elementary school system in the village of Bara.
Obeid, who ran a gold and jewelry business, is considered the black sheep of the family. When his business failed he turned to other ways of earning money, some of them dubious. For a time he cashed checks and bills, and got into debt. The family came to his aid time after time.
In 1996, the family was no longer able to help. Obeid was arrested together with Ofer Schneitman, the owner of a gun shop in Kfar Sava, on suspicion of conspiring to sell hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition to Palestinians from the territories. Obeid was released after a month in detention; Schneitman was sentenced to 13 months in prison for selling 2,000 rounds of ammunition to a Palestinian who turned out to be a Shin Bet agent. Schneitman said on Wednesday, "I paid my debt to society and I have no interest in talking about the subject."
Some time later, Obeid was sentenced to prison for carrying a pistol and ammunition without a permit. According to attorney David Dari, the Obeid family's lawyer, Obeid served a term of about a year and a half in prison for this offense.
However, it was apparently Obeid's connection with Mohammed Biro that led him to embrace Hezbollah. In the 1970s, Biro was a customs agent in South Lebanon, though it turned out afterward that he was one of the biggest drug traffickers in the country. In the 1980s, Biro was considered to be close to Israel: the defense minister at the time, Moshe Arens, was even a guest in Biro's home.
In the past few years, lawyers of convicted Israeli drug dealers maintained that the police were ignoring operations of drug dealers in South Lebanon and in fact soliciting their assistance to incriminate Israelis who were doing business with them. The word in Lebanon was that this situation developed because the Lebanese were serving as agents of Israeli intelligence. These lawyers also claimed that arrests were made only in cases when the amount of drugs smuggled into Israel was particularly large. Hassan Obeid, Kais's father, was incriminated by this means and in 1989 was sentenced to ten years in prison for drug trafficking. He was released after seven years and died not long afterward. Also arrested with him, and sentenced to 15 years, was Mohammed Biro. Later, his son, Ali Biro, was also arrested on drug charges. Both father and son are currently serving lengthy prison terms in Israel.
Before he died, Hassan Obeid asked his sons to visit Mohammed Biro in prison. Kais Obeid visited him several times and thus got to know him and his family, who live in Lebanon. The Shin Bet suspects that he became especially friendly with Kaid Biro, Mohammed's youngest son. Kais and Kaid met several times in Europe, and this was apparently the means through which Kais made contact with Hezbollah. It's thought that Mohammed Biro, who is due to be released from prison in about a year, wants to rid himself of the image of a "collaborator" with Israel.
Not long before Kais Obeid disappeared in September 2000, he and Biro were linked to another security-criminal affair. In April 2001, an indictment was filed in Gaza military court against Nasser Iyad, who was arrested in January 2001. Two weeks after his arrest, Israeli army helicopters firing missiles assassinated his father, Colonel Massoud Iyad, who was considered a senior officer in Force 17, the Palestinian Authority security unit that was in charge of protecting PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and was also involved in maritime activity. After the liquidation, sources in the IDF said that Massoud had also been a representative of Hezbollah and had set up a clandestine network for the organization, which had fired mortars at Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
According to the indictment, Nasser Iyad, along with a friend of his from Gaza, Faez Shahuan, who had a permit to enter Israel from Gaza and do business in equipment for containers, as well as Kais Obeid and Kaid Biro planned to smuggle cocaine worth $100,000 into Israel from Gaza in a container. Another scheme was to smuggle weapons - 50 Kalashnikov and M-16 rifles, RPG rocket launchers and 40,000 rounds of ammunition - across the Lebanon-Israel border. Shahuan was to have received about $30,000 for his part in the transaction.
The third section of the indictment asserts that Kaid Biro and Kais Obeid conspired "to commit a crime (abduction with the intent of removing an individual out of the region)." The purpose, according to the indictment, was to bring about the release from prison of Mohammed Biro, Kaid's father. According to the plan, "the kidnap victim was to be between 20 and 25 years old. The kidnappers were going to be in a car and stop for a soldier or a civilian hitchhiker, and afterward find some pretext for stopping by the side of the road. At this point they would attack the passenger, sedate him, stuff him into the container and smuggle him into the Gaza Strip via the Karni checkpoint. They then planned to transfer him to a rendezvous point on a fishing boat, there to be picked up by Kaid Biro and Kais Obeid, who would arrive by boat from Lebanon. At the rendezvous, Iyad was to hand over the victim and receive drugs and weapons."
Since Kais Obeid's disappearance, several of his brothers have been detained a number of times, and one of them was placed in administrative detention (arrest without trial). His sister, Mona, was also arrested on suspicion that she spoke to him on a public telephone in Kfar Sava. As a result, she was suspended from her job. The family lawyer, David Dari, has filed suit against the state in Labor Court, demanding that Mona Obeid be reinstated. He is arguing, in the name of Kais's brothers, that the purpose of the arrest was to intimidate them and put pressure on Kais to return to Israel. "We are being harassed with no justification," Akram Obeid said this week. "We do not know where Kais is. We are not in touch with him and we do not believe the rumors and accusations against him.
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